Open-Air Prison

We do not know what Sinwar must have felt when he returned to Gaza and witnessed the changes that had transpired over the past two decades. One thing was the desolation of the Gaza Strip, whose population had more than doubled from 589,000 in 1988 to 1.6 million in 2011. The Israeli–Egyptian blockade against Gaza had destroyed its economy in a collective punishment of the strip’s population. They were effectively confined in what can only be described as an open-air prison.

The de-development of Gaza persisted with unrelenting force throughout the 2010s. By 2022, nearly 80 percent of Gaza’s population depended on aid, with food insecurity reaching 65.9 percent. Almost half of its population suffered from multidimensional poverty. More than half of its population was unemployed by 2018, while the numbers for its youth population exceeded 70 percent.

Almost half of Gaza’s population were children, and a sixteen-year-old would by 2023 have experienced four wars and a countless number of skirmishes, air strikes, and cross-border armed confrontations. The Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (also known as the Goldstone Report) stated in 2009 that the primary purpose of restricting goods into Gaza was “to bring about a situation in which the civilian population would find life so intolerable that they would leave (if that were possible) or turn Hamas out of office, as well as to collectively punish the civilian population.”

It is also unclear what Sinwar thought about the changes taking place within his own movement, Hamas. When Sinwar was imprisoned in 1988, Hamas was a clandestine movement, and its military apparatus was a small network of military cells. Now, Hamas was the government and responsible for the social welfare and administration in Gaza. The Qassam Brigades was the de facto security service in the strip.

Sinwar had been personally close to the spiritual guide of Hamas, Ahmad Yasin, and militants like Salah Shahada. Now, the upper echelons of the movement were filled by a professional class of politicians “who had forgotten what it was like to be on the run or in prison,” as Israeli journalist Avi Issacharoff put it.

Sinwar rapidly rose in the Hamas hierarchy. Seniority, his credentials from the armed Palestinian struggle, and the time he had served in prison meant that Sinwar’s influence on the military wing, and their loyalty in return, were unquestionable. His brother, Muhammad, served as a prominent military commander in the Qassam Brigades, which created an important communication channel between the wings.

Sinwar’s Rise

By 2015, Sinwar was the de facto security minister of Hamas, with the responsibility for conducting negotiations with Israel for the release of Hamas prisoners in Israel in exchange for the bodies of two killed Israeli soldiers and the release of two Israelis who had wandered into Gaza and been captured.

The position of Sinwar also strengthened within the Qassam Brigades. Senior al-Qassam leader Ahmad al-Ja’bari was assassinated in November 2012, which meant Muhammad Deif had to retake the leadership role in the military wing. Still, Deif was reportedly physically weakened after surviving at least five assassination attempts between 2001 and 2014.

In the first assassination attempt, Deif lost an eye and part of his arm. He was also severely wounded the second time, in 2006, with reports of losing additional limbs, and Deif was forced to undergo a series of orthopaedic treatments and vacate his position to al-Ja’bari. Paralyzed and with prolonged periods of rehabilitation, his deputy, Marwan Issa, took control of daily affairs.

On August 18, 2014, during Operation Protective Edge, the Israelis dropped a one-ton bomb on Deif’s home. After one minute, they dropped another one. His wife, his seven-month-old son, and his three-year-old daughter were killed. Deif survived.

His miraculous survival against overwhelming odds — a sign, according to some, of divine protection — gave Deif a legendary status. His severe disabilities and the debilitating headaches from the shrapnel lodged in his head meant that Sinwar and Issa were the ones who effectively held daily command over the Qassam Brigades.

Another factor contributing to the rise of Sinwar was the success with which he framed himself as the polar opposite of other political leaders in Hamas. Khaled Mishal frequented luxury hotels, talked with the international press, and lived a relatively affluent life compared to Gazan standards. Sinwar, conversely, remained an ascetic and exercised his political capital under modest conditions in Khan Yunis refugee camp while shunning the media.

Power Struggles

In the internal elections of 2017, Sinwar was elected Hamas’s leader in Gaza, succeeding Ismail Haniyeh, who moved on to replace Mishal. Observers interpreted the elections as a protest against Hamas’s leadership and economic and social policies in Gaza, in addition to the failure to capitalize on the 2014 Gazan war, which instead brought widespread destruction.

The formalization of Sinwar’s authority effectively cemented the shift in Hamas’s internal power balance. While the external leadership had controlled the Qassam Brigades since the 1990s by overseeing funding, the growth of Gaza’s tunnel economy and the strategic redirection of Iranian aid to the military wing bolstered the Gazan leadership’s autonomy.

By the mid-2010s, reports emerged that the Qassam Brigades had become the de facto rulers, with Deif, Issa, and Sinwar holding ultimate authority over all decisions. Beyond Sinwar’s formal ascension in Hamas’s hierarchy, the influence of the Qassam Brigades was also bolstered as its militants swept the local elections in several areas of Gaza.

There are thus two ways to view Hamas’s effort to revise its charter in 2017. On the one hand, it was obvious that its 1988 charter did the movement few favors. Hamas had moderated key positions from the early 1990s, and Hamas leaders and senior members seldom if ever referred to the 1988 charter to explain movement positions.

By then, the movement had already shifted away from framing the conflict as part of a global Jewish-crusader conspiracy against Islam. Instead of reflecting Hamas’s new position, which distinguished between Judaism as a religion and Zionism as a political movement, the 1988 charter was used by critics to portray the group as intransigent, fundamentalist, and, not least, supposedly antisemitic.

On the other hand, the process to revise the charter was also caused by the rise of Hamas’s hard-liners in the internal elections. Mishal, its architect, hoped that the document would create consensus on all declared Hamas positions and commit “the new leadership to those positions regardless of any hard-line tendency that some of its members may have,” according to Khaled Hroub.

The March of Return

Because Sinwar was perceived as both “extremely hardline and at the same time ruthlessly pragmatic,” in the words of the Economist, widely differing predictions were traded over the next years. Several referred to his military credentials and predicted that his ascent increased the likelihood for another Gazan–Israeli war.

Yet Sinwar quickly declared that he embraced peaceful popular resistance against the Israeli occupation, that he sought a long-term truce with Israel and pushed for negotiations, that another war was not in Hamas’s interests, and that he would work for political reconciliation with Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank. In fact, Sinwar actively held back, which was interpreted as a dawning realization that Gaza had more to lose than the Israelis.

Although he also defended the use of violence to draw attention to the Palestinian cause, he ostensibly proved a more complex political player than initially assumed. Sinwar showed how one could be both moderate and hard-line depending on the issue, and external drivers were key to the political line adopted.

Much indicates that the Israeli suppression of the Great March of Return in 2018 was a crucial turning point. Rallying Palestinians of all ages, genders, and political and social groups, the unifying element was from the onset a shared principle of being unarmed and peaceful. Explicitly referencing the 1948 dispossession of Palestinians, the protesters demanded the right to return to the villages and towns from which they were displaced during the Nakba.

Initially pervaded by a sense of optimism, national songs were sung, lunches were prepared for families and children, and young girls were dressed in traditional embroidered dresses. Prayers and football matches were performed alike. For many Gazans, the march was initially a reprieve from the suffocating conditions in the strip.

In its February 2019 report, the independent international commission of inquiry concluded: “In the commission’s view, the demonstrations were civilian in nature, had clearly stated political aims and, despite some acts of significant violence, did not constitute combat or a military campaign.” Notwithstanding, Israeli soldiers were ordered to shoot anyone within several hundred meters of the fence and used considerable force to suppress the protests.

Israeli forces, most of whom were snipers, shot and killed 223 Palestinians during the march. Forty-six of them were minors. Amnesty International observed how “Israeli soldiers shot unarmed protesters, bystanders, journalists and medical staff approximately 150–400 meters from the fence, where they did not pose any threat.” By the end of the protests, at least 10,000 people were injured, including nearly 2,000 children.

Impasse

Ultimately, it must have been clear to Sinwar by the late 2010s that Hamas’s governance project in Gaza had become a net loss for the movement. After over a decade, Hamas was no nearer to lifting the blockade. Its population still suffered from the politically willed poverty, unemployment, and aid-dependence.

Israel did not even bother approaching Hamas as a political actor, but instead viewed Gaza as a security issue, an excess population to be pacified indefinitely. Hamas’s relationship with Iran had begun to normalize, but even this was a return to the pre-2012 status quo. There were no signs of the reconciliation efforts with the PA in the West Bank bearing fruit.

From 2020, the Abraham Accords initiated a normalization process between Israel and several Arab states, while Palestinian–Israeli negotiations remained at an impasse. As the blockade of Gaza normalized and the West Bank remained pacified by the Israeli infrastructure of control, it was clear that the Palestinian cause simply did not seem to be prioritized by the international community.

Hamas’s popularity was also declining, and there was growing popular unrest caused by the government’s inability to improve living conditions. In March 2019, protests erupted with the slogan “We Want to Live,” which developed into one of the most serious anti-government protests in Gaza since 2007.

“We’re not political and we don’t want to change political systems. We just want to get our rights,” one Gazan activist proclaimed. “We want jobs, we want to live. We want equality, dignity and freedom.” Hamas’s answer was to violently crack down on the protesters.

The political costs notwithstanding, the blockade allowed Hamas to develop its military capabilities and infrastructure. Smuggling tunnels in Gaza had existed since 1981. It was with the blockade on Gaza from 2007 on that the tunnels turned into a lifeline, as they were increasingly used to smuggle food, medicine, fuel, and any product required to sustain life beyond the bare minimum.

Another, military, tunnel network was also constructed once Hamas ousted Fatah from the strip. Realizing that the Palestinians could not defeat the Israeli occupation military at sea, in the air, or on land, the developing tunnel strategy allowed Hamas to move freely, conduct training exercises, and test weapons far from the gaze of Israeli drones hovering above.

October 7

By 2021, Hamas had reportedly dug an underground network exceeding 500 kilometers, with some passages sufficiently large to drive a car through. The tunnel network was also used to secretly manufacture weapons, and — although far from self-sufficient — Hamas produced a large part of its own arsenal, developed drones and unmanned underwater vehicles, and engaged in cyber warfare.

The weapons that Hamas could not produce itself were smuggled into Gaza from Iran either by sea or by land, first via Yemen and Sudan and then through the Egyptian desert with the help of Bedouin smugglers. Components for ballistic missiles were smuggled into Gaza, where trained al-Qassam personnel constructed them. Engineers in Hamas also traveled to Iran, where they received training in developing more advanced systems.

Politically and diplomatically at an impasse, Hamas still managed to strengthen militarily. In July 2023, an Israeli intelligence officer warned her commanders that Hamas had completed a series of training exercises in which the armed wing simulated raids against Israeli kibbutzim and army outposts on the Israeli side of the Gazan border. Her superiors dismissively brushed off her warnings as “imaginary.” After all, although there had been the occasional military conflagration during the last sixteen years, they had never threatened the Israelis.

Moreover, this was not the first time Hamas had trained on surprise raids on the Israeli side of the border. Such exercises had been reported as early as June 2015, when Israeli newspapers noted that “it is possible that . . . Hamas will attempt in the next war to raid an Israeli community or army base, killing as many civilians or soldiers as possible.” Still, training exercises remained training exercises.

Then, on Saturday, October 7, 2023, at 6:30 a.m., Hamas launched 2,200 rockets from the Gaza Strip toward southern and central Israel. As air raid sirens warned Israelis to find cover, 3,000 soldiers from Hamas’s special forces stormed the Gaza border wall and crossed into Israel by land, air, and sea.