Life and Legacy of Yahiya Sinwar

Behind the walls of Zionist prisons and through periods of detention

that stretched for years,

Yahya Sinwar and Abdel Nasser Issa shared the experience of imprisonment

with all its harsh confrontations and details of daily life

and memories of their comrades.

Issa, a former prisoner and Hamas leader,

spent thirty-four years in Zionist prisons, including nine

and twenty consecutive years. He knew Abu Ibrahim

personally and shared with him stages of the journey of imprisonment,

and retained memories of the man his comrades knew inside

the cells before the world came to know him as a leader

of Hamas and the launcher of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.

The elder brother, leader Abu Ibrahim Sinwar.

I lived with him for a long time in prison, since the year 1995

until his release in the year 2011.

I lived with him during several periods, and we were together in the same cell during

solitary confinement in Beersheba Prison, in southern\Palestine, and we were also

in partial isolation for several years in Hadarim, in northern\Palestine, and in

and in

Beersheba is also in southern Palestine, and in Nafha there are several prisons.

In captivity, where space grows tight and

characters are revealed. Leadership positions alone do not make their holders

memorable. What remains in memory is what a person leaves

in the souls of those who share the hardship of the experience.

From these details recalled by his comrade emerges

the image of Abu Ibrahim the man, the leader who was not

kept from his comrades by responsibility, nor prevented by the harshness

of prison from maintaining his relationship with them.

Abu Ibrahim was

a great leader in prison, but he was humble, as I told you,

and he was keen to serve his brothers, so much so that he

insisted on preparing food

for them himself, despite his great stature and people's love for him.

Sinwar spent about 23 years in captivity after

his arrest in 1988

and his sentence of four life terms. During those

years, the cell was not the end of action, nor was

prison a complete isolation from the Palestinian people's struggle.

At the heart of this experience, Sinwar emerged within the movement's leadership

The female prisoner confronting the prison system and attempts to subjugate

the prisoners, and the years of imprisonment were a period

in which experience and knowledge accumulated.

He worked in security and excelled at confronting the occupation's agents

inside the prisons. They were few, but they existed, and Abu Ibrahim

worked in this field and was

distinguished in it. Abu Ibrahim worked in the cultural

educational, and academic fields. He was among the first

to contribute to bringing universities into the prisons

in cooperation with his brother, the martyred professor

Dr. Zakaria al-Sinwar, who was martyred a year ago,

may he rest in peace, was the first to bring university education into prisons,

through Al-Aqsa University in the Gaza Strip. He also focused on the

security aspects of the Prophet’s biography and wrote several books and works on the subject.

مؤلفات.

The years of imprisonment were not idle years in Sinwar’s life.

Alongside the battle for steadfastness, he devoted himself to understanding the side

he was confronting, its language, history, society,

and institutions. His interest in Zionist affairs

Building on the belief that understanding the enemy is part of understanding

the conflict itself, and that knowledge cannot be separated from

preparation for confrontation.

He was interested in Zionist affairs and understood Israel well.

He majored in Hebrew at the Hebrew University.

The history of the Jewish people. He advised me to study Hebrew and attend

the Hebrew

University in order to understand the enemy, under the slogan, “Know your enemy.”

If you want to defeat your enemy, you must know your enemy’s language and understand your enemy’s culture

and how your enemy thinks, so that you can confront them

properly.

The imprisoned leader and fighter, Yahya Sinwar.

Sinwar was released from prison in the Wafaa al-Ahrar deal in 2011,

but he did not abandon the path of confrontation.

He returned to Gaza and rose through positions of responsibility within the

Hamas movement until he became head of its political bureau in the Strip

in 2017.

From the prisoner who knew the details of prison to the leader

who assumed political and field responsibilities, his journey

continued with the occupation at the heart of his calculations.

When he was released, we expected Abu Ibrahim to become an important figure.

We knew Abu Ibrahim had not gotten out to sleep, but to continue

the struggle. He was, I mean,

a man of principle.

Unity of the fronts, he was someone who, I mean, focused on that.

Unity of the fronts and unity of the resistance everywhere, in Lebanon and in Iran, and

Yemen, and everywhere. Any movement, any group, any

institution, any state, any party that wants to support Palestine and work for

the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, through the pinnacle of Islam, which is

armed resistance. Abu Ibrahim welcomed this and was ready to

cooperate as brothers facing a common enemy.

A year after the Al-Aqsa Flood, Yahya Sinwar was martyred in Rafah,

in the southern Gaza Strip, confronting occupation forces,

ending his journey in the field to which his life was bound.

The testimony of his fellow prisoners remains a window onto aspects of

his life story that positions cannot sum up, nor can dates recount.

The memory of a man his comrades knew behind bars,

and a leader whose name was tied to a pivotal stage in the history

of the Palestinian cause.