Sinwar brings a cunning, brutal past

'There was talk of how he was not a threat...I tried to tell them they were wrong'

- ETHAN BRONNER

Yahya Sinwar, right, with the late Ismail Haniyeh, is Hamas's new political chief.

Almost six years ago, Yahya Sinwar, who’s just been named the political leader of Hamas, scrawled a note on a document that he knew Egyptian intermediaries would hand to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Take a “ ‘calculated risk’ on a ceasefire,” Sinwar wrote in Hebrew, according to former national security adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat.

Not long before, when he was the new Hamas chief for Gaza, Sinwar had said something similar to an Italian journalist: “I don’t want war anymore. I want a ceasefire.” His ambition for the impoverished Palestinian coastal strip? “We can be like Singapore, like Dubai.”

For the past 10 months, since Hamas’s long-planned and bloody Oct. 7 assault, the Israeli security establishment and others have looked back on his words as part of an effort to create the illusion that Hamas, considered a terrorist group by the U.S. and European Union, was limiting its embrace of violence to focus on governance.

Now, Sinwar has taken charge of a portfolio that includes ceasefire negotiations after the assassination last week in Tehran of Ismail Hani yeh, the previous Hamas political chief, solidifying control of the group by its fearsome military leader.

“Sinwar’s election effectively marks the subordination of Hamas’s political wing in its entirety to Sinwar,” Arab affairs commentator Avi Issacharoff wrote in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper this week.

Israeli officials have said that Sinwar was running ceasefire negotiations behind the scenes all along, a notion seconded by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who said that he’s been “the primary decider.” Others say Sinwar oversaw the talks at first but he’s now unable to communicate while hiding in Gaza and was given the political title as an act of symbolism, to tell Israel and the world that he’s the essence of the movement.