NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

The life of Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza.

- DAVID REMNICK

In the archives of Israel's military courts, there is a six-page document, handwritten in Hebrew, that records an interrogation of Yahya Ibrahim Hassan Sinwar, the Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip. The document, dated February 8, 1999, gives him identification number 955266978.

Sinwar was thirty-six at the time, and had been imprisoned for eleven years. Before being jailed, he had led a Hamas unit called Munazamat al-]i-had wa al-Da'wa, or the Majd—an enforcement squad that punished those who collaborated with Israel or who committed offenses against orthodox Islamic morality, including homosexuality, marital infidelity, and the possession of pornography. Sinwar was serving four life sentences in a facility in the Negev Desert for executing Palestinians accused of working with the enemy. Ass his interrogator, a sergeant named David Cohen, recorded, he also admitted to another crime: the year before, he had conspired from prison to engineer the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier.