Yahya Sinwar - Seeds of hatred and the Nazi breeding platform: For the first time, the transcripts of the interrogations of the Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip and one of the founders of the terrorist organization's military wing are revealed, as they became clear already in 1989 when he was arrested by the Shin Bet in Khan Yunis for the murder of collaborators with Israel – most of them by sadistic strangling of them with his own hands.
Defense Minister Galant: "We will reach Sinwar and eliminate him" // GPO
Sinwar, who at the time was in charge of Hamas' internal investigations, surprised the police interrogators by giving them a tour of all the locations where he buried the bodies of the collaborators he murdered.
On October 15 of that year, when he sat down with interrogator Superintendent Shlomo Eyal, Sinwar decided to open it all: "I'm ready to tell you everything, from the beginning, things I've done and never talked about," according to transcripts of his interrogation, spread out in dense handwriting over ten pages preserved in the Supreme Court archives.
Carried on the shoulders of fans on the day he was released from prison, Photo: Reuters
About three years earlier, in 1986, Sinwar had teamed up with then-Hamas chairman Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Reminder: Yassin was then freshly released from an Israeli prison, which was one of the 1,151 security prisoners and detainees released in 1985 as part of the Jibril deal, which led to the return to Israel of three IDF soldiers captured during the Peace for Galilee War. In coordination with Yassin, Sinwar established a sub-organization called "The Majd," whose purpose was to serve as a security apparatus to thwart collaborators with Israel.
"When Sheikh Yassin was released from prison in the exchange deal, I used to go visit him," Sinwar said, "We sat and talked among ourselves about all kinds of things, and among other things we also talked about the situation in the Gaza Strip, the state of Islam and the collaborators with Israel." We decided to use people to gather information about the collaborators and anyone who opposes religion and Islam. I knew it was dangerous, so I recruited Ruahi Jamal who could be trusted. He agreed.
On the bus released in the Jibril deal, photo: AFP
"I updated Sheikh Yassin and we started working. Everyone was responsible for a different area, I got the southern Gaza Strip. We would pass the information between us in mailboxes in mosques." Sinwar later told the interrogators how he recruited more and more operatives, mainly from the universities of Gaza, when he would get Yassin's approval for their assassinations.
Horrendous coolness
Throughout his interrogations, Sinwar spent hours detailing the murders – all of which he committed himself, some by shooting and some by strangling with his own hands. Among other things, he told of surveillance he and his operatives carried out for four days on a resident of the Gaza Strip named Rasmi Salim, following information they received that he was an infidel in Islam and a collaborator with Israel.
With Haniyeh, as a former prisoner and future contestant,
"We drove in a white Peugeot, stopped next to Rasmi, grabbed him and put him in the car," Sinwar described with horrifying coolness. "We interrogated Rasmi, and he admitted that he was in contact with Israeli intelligence, with a man named Abu Rami. He also admitted that he would bring girls to his store and mess with them. We didn't hit him much, interrogating mostly with his mouth.
"We took him to the cemetery in Khan Yunis, without telling him what we were going to do. I tied his eyes with a rag so he wouldn't see, put him in a large grave I saw, and strangled him with a keffiyeh I had. After strangling him, I wrapped him in a white cloth and closed the grave. I understood from Sami that he understood that he deserved to die."
Choking as a method
Sinwar also told interrogators that Hamas later supplied him with weapons that had been hidden at the university in Khan Yunis, but that he preferred to kill the suspected collaborators by strangling them with his hands. Thus, for example, he described how, following similar information, they acted to assassinate a man named Adnan Zafur, when Sinwar threatened and kidnapped him with a pistol, and after a violent interrogation ("we beat him"), he admitted that he collaborated with Israel – which immediately decided his sentence: "I strangled him with a keffiyeh, we dug in the place and my brother and I buried him there."
Transcripts of interrogations of Yahya Sinwar,
In a similar way, Sinwar detailed two other murders of Gaza residents that he had committed. "We saw Fathi Issa walking alone in Al Bureij refugee camp," he told investigators, "We got out of the car, threatened him with a gun and put him in the car. From there we drove to the orchard and I investigated my openings.
"I grabbed his throat with one hand and started choking him, with the other I punched him in the stomach and suddenly he had a heart attack and died. We drove to the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, and using a hoe I had in my car, we dug a hole. When we finished, we went back to the orchard to get the body and drove to the pit to bury him."
The bodies are on their way to the top
Sinwar and his men's next target was Hussein al-Sir from Khan Yunis, a wealthy man who used to brag about his Mercedes. "When we found him in his car, I took out the gun and threatened him," he said. "I put the gun around his neck, told him, 'Get in my car,' and when he got out of his car he started resisting.
Exchanging information in mosques. With the son of an Al Qassam Brigades fighter killed by the IDF, photo: AFP
"I pressed the gun against his neck to get him into the car, but then a bullet came out and hit him because I had left the wicket open. We quickly put him in the car and drove away. We got behind a factory, where we buried the body. After that, we washed the car of all the blood and all the signs and went home. After a while, I think the next day, we saw an army and I knew they had found Hussein's body."
Sinwar was convicted of these and other murders and sentenced to five life sentences, which he was supposed to serve until his last day, but in October 2011 he was released from prison – only 22 years after his conviction – as part of the deal to return kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for the release of 1,027 Palestinian security prisoners and detainees from Israeli prisons.
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar celebrating the 35th anniversary of the movement's founding in Gaza, photo: AP
While in prison, Sinwar learned Hebrew, gained power and status in Hamas until he became its leader in February 2017, after defeating Ismail Haniyeh in internal elections for Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip.
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