Sinwar Storm in the Gaza Tunnels

TEHRAN (Defapress) - Mohammad Turk Yilmaz: Sinwar was simultaneously the most political of military men and the most military of politicians. He had united the hidden and active Gaza underground with the calm and smiling Gaza above ground. A figure had emerged between Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh, enabling the Palestinian Resistance to enter a new phase of its history, namely the Storm. Gaza was Sinwar’s Gaza.

1) The City

It was the early days of the “Al-Aqsa Storm” Operation. I was speaking with a friend from Gaza. He was grieving for his martyred friends but was even more worried. He said this war was different from all the wars before. When I asked about the difference, among dozens of important points he could have mentioned, he replied: “In the previous wars, when they ended, Yahya Sinwar would walk through the streets of Gaza, chanting slogans, and the city would come alive. But that won’t happen anymore.” He wasn’t chanting slogans or idolizing Sinwar. He was simply stating the reality. At that time, Sinwar wasn’t a household name. I asked about other leaders, like Mohammed Deif. He said the people don’t see Deif. That great fighter isn’t a political figure or a city manager; people don’t even know if he’s truly alive or martyred. He also said that many of Hamas’s political leaders living abroad weren’t seen as attached to Gaza or as ordinary people like them, sharing their pain. Sinwar was simultaneously the most political of military men and the most military of politicians. He had united the hidden and active Gaza underground with the calm and smiling Gaza above ground. A figure had emerged between Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh, enabling the Palestinian Resistance to enter a new phase of its history, namely the Storm. Gaza was Sinwar’s Gaza. 

The astonishment of what I heard stayed with me from that moment. The city was on the verge of destruction, and the scale of the catastrophe was immense. But when the young fighter thought about the future of his city, it seemed he was at ease, knowing that after the war, houses, hospitals, and parks would be rebuilt by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or some other wealthy entity, as compensation for the Arab world’s shame of inaction during the war or as a burden imposed by the international community, America, to advance its regional agendas. But he knew that a city is a living place, and that cannot be built with concrete blocks. Life is created through community, empathy, and, let’s say, popular unity around a pillar, a statesman, they have a mission, a difficult and important task, and a future, a dream, that makes life possible. Imagining the vitality of life flowing through Gaza without Sinwar was difficult for him. It was as if Gaza became a place to live, a place where one could breathe and find a path forward, more than anything else, through Sinwar’s steadfast steps in its streets, his bittersweet and captivating smile, his piercing eyes, and his sincere and firm conversations with the people in the markets and alleys.

2) The People

After the martyrdom of Sayyed Hassan, I spoke with another informed friend from Gaza. I won’t delve into his general complaints and analysis, but the lack of simultaneous, comprehensive, and more serious engagement by members of the Resistance front in the war was a strategic mistake, allowing Israel to advance step by step, and he was worried this trend would continue until the war reached Tehran. He said, “They will definitely target Sinwar too. Because Gaza is small, and Sinwar doesn’t leave the danger zone or distance himself from the lives of Gaza’s people.” I said, when his death would be considered a major military victory for the enemy, what’s wrong, based on the logic of war, with him leaving and keeping his distance? He replied, “No, that’s impossible in our culture. Sinwar would never do that, because the people don’t expect that from him.” The people’s expectations were more decisive than purely military calculations.

The scene of Sinwar’s martyrdom in the middle of Rafah city confirmed the accuracy of his understanding of the commander. Sinwar knew that without a covenant, meaning an expectation from one side to uphold it and a comprehensive effort from the other to fulfill it, no victory would truly be a victory, and no friendship or community would be formed. Of course, the war Sinwar started was launched without a referendum or opinion polls from his people or even Hamas leaders, but the deep desire and expectation of the people were at its core. He was committed to fulfilling his people’s expectations and showing that a covenant existed, even at the cost of his life, and even at the cost of handing a significant military achievement to the enemy.

However, this attention of his was not separate from the matter of victory or defeat in battle. He who said, “Resistance is not just the weapon in our hands, but the love we have for Palestine in every breath we take; it is the will to survive,” knew that ultimately, the people’s will is the final determinant of the battle, a will that manifests itself more in action and real decision-making moments than in opinion polls. In his December 2022 speech, where he announced the Al-Aqsa Storm plan in advance, saying, “God willing, we will come to you in a roaring flood,” his metaphor for this movement was the enduring ebb and flow of the entire sea: “With millions of our people, we will come to you like an unstoppable tide.” And he advised his people to “be a flood that knows no retreat and does not rest until the world acknowledges that we are the rightful owners and not just numbers in the news.”

3) The Government

About 20 years ago, serious disagreements and debates arose among Resistance groups about entering the realm of forming a government and turning the Islamic Resistance movement into a political party. Although these debates concluded in favor of Hamas participating in elections, winning them, and taking control of the Gaza government, forming a government, especially in a completely besieged area dependent on dealings with the Zionist regime, required a kind of recognition of Israel and engaging in interactions and deals that could naturally lead the Resistance toward normalization and abandoning the idea of liberating Palestine. It’s possible that this very hope on the part of America and Israel paved the way for Hamas to gain this opportunity. Sinwar’s response to the question “Government or war?” was this: “God has granted us capability, and we must use it for war.”

According to Palestinian reports, he, who was concerned about the ordinary employment of Gaza’s people and even entered into agreements with Israel for this purpose, assigned tasks to various segments of Gaza’s population after regular working hours to advance the idea and capability of liberating Palestine, engaging them in a grand mission. By intelligently coordinating Gaza’s above-ground and underground, the Hamas government made the most of the opportunity to strengthen Gaza’s power and resistance. In a video from a few years ago, published after October 7, Sinwar, while visiting secret missile-building workshops, says, “Our priority is the liberation plan and equipping for it”, even though appearances suggested otherwise.

During his tenure as head of Hamas’s political office in the Gaza Strip, besides concluding a national reconciliation agreement with the Palestinian Authority, Sinwar engaged in dealings with Israel, the UAE, and Egypt for various matters, such as addressing employment issues, securing supplies, and building Gaza’s power plant. They were pleased with his peaceful approach. Perhaps they thought that this prisoner, sentenced to over 400 years in prison and released after 23 years through a prisoner exchange, had accepted the impossibility of freedom from the larger prison and was now focused on improving the quality of life in the large prison of Gaza. But Sinwar not only hadn’t lost hope, he was nurturing a higher level of hope in his heart, which had led him to this seemingly hopeless action. Sinwar’s perspective and advice to fighters was: “Don’t fear prison; prison is part of our long journey toward freedom.” Engaging in improving prison conditions, whether in Israel’s physical prison or the Gaza government prison, served a fundamental purpose for him in preserving the dream of liberation and creating its real possibility. This veil was both a cover to conceal the main work, a source of small victories to sustain hope for success, and a means to secure the connections and resources needed to break the prison, just as open daytime activities always serve as a cover for the authentic, hidden life of the night.

His prison companions also say that Sinwar’s interrogations were lengthy, and he spoke extensively with the Israelis. They were initially worried that he was giving information to the enemy, but it later became clear that Sinwar had turned his interrogations and interactions into a means of gathering information and analysis about his interrogators and jailers, turning his imprisonment in the enemy’s prison into a reconnaissance operation deep in enemy territory!

He who was serious about achieving real freedom could neither ignore the government nor remain idle waiting for it. In a strange piece of advice to Palestinians, he said, “Don’t wait for justice; be justice yourselves.”

4) Unity

For Sinwar, forming a government in Gaza was not merely a means to bolster military capabilities. He saw the war more broadly and recognized a connection between government and unity. Some of his strict measures and his fight against the economic corruption of some Hamas leaders in Gaza, which led to their flight from Gaza, were part of this war, as were his presence among the people and his sincere conversations. After Sheik Ahmed Yassin, perhaps no one had been able to become such a unifying figure in Gaza, beloved by various factions and groups.

After Sinwar’s martyrdom, I asked a Palestinian friend about Sinwar’s most significant trait compared to other leaders. He showed me the palm of his hand and said, “He was sincere.” This honesty helped him grasp the full reality, give everything its due, and avoid getting caught up in various games, even the game of Resistance. This is the most essential quality for uniting a society.

Years ago, during his 430-year imprisonment in an Israeli jail, despite restrictions, Sinwar wrote the novel Thorns and Carnations, addressing the Palestinian issue from multiple perspectives. This sincere, dramatic, unpretentious, and non-sloganeering novel was not written about or for the resistance but within and with the resistance, with ink mixed with blood. People were punished and tortured to preserve and smuggle its pages out of prison. In this book, which can be considered Sinwar’s life manifesto, he clearly demonstrates his passion for understanding and fulfilling the rights of the other side and his concern for unity, which forms the drama of his story.

The author engages us with serious and rational arguments about the futility of Resistance, and it is this understanding and engagement that later makes it possible to overcome the fundamental flaws of the old Resistance model and elevate it to a new level. In the sixth chapter of the book, when the newly established occupying Israel, needing labor to build its country, grants work permits to homeless Palestinians, and the fedayeen consider those who take the permits traitors, and Palestinians debate “How can we build our enemy’s state?” while so-called realist perspectives argue that “Israel’s state is already established, and our refusal to work won’t change that,” the author says, “But they needed to discuss the issue from another angle: the homes that needed a piece of bread and milk for their infants and couldn’t find it; and working in Israel, despite its hardship and bitterness, was a national mission to support the people in camps and villages so they wouldn’t be forced to migrate out of necessity... The people desperately needed to alleviate their children’s hunger and provide their families with homes that had doors that could be closed and walls.” Simultaneously paying attention to preserving family honor and national honor, and seeing their necessary continuity, creates a unique stance and enables the formation of a truly national Islamic Resistance movement.

Sinwar’s all-encompassing and unifying honesty also gave him a distinct position amid Hamas’s intense internal political disputes. During the region-burning wars of the 2010s, following the American-backed Arab Spring project, when Hamas became involved in fighting against Bashar Assad’s government in Syria, he said, “We are against anyone who wants to fight any Islamic or Arab state or any Resistance group. We are against any hostility toward Syria, Iran, or Hezbollah, and we will not turn our weapons away from the enemy.” This was an intelligent and resolute opposition to the majority of Hamas’s stance against Iran at the time, but it also contained opposition to the logic of Iran’s actions at that moment. Had this holistic perspective prevailed in the rest of the region, or at least within the rest of the resistance axis, the groundwork for weakening the region, ending Israel’s isolation, and paving the way for the Abraham Accords might not have been laid.

It should be added that Sinwar’s stance in this regard was not based on short-term interests, such as preserving Iran’s military support for Hamas. Years earlier, in chapter 13 of Thorns and Carnations, he explained the logic of the Islamic Resistance movement’s refusal to align with Palestinians supporting the overthrow of King Hussein’s regime in Jordan: “We will never be a tool to plunge any part of the region into uncertainty.”

5) War

Analyzing Al-Aqsa Storm Operation is not the subject of this text, but understanding Sinwar’s perspective on the nature of war for Palestine and the transformation brought about by the emergence of Islamic movements, most traceable in Thorns and Carnations, helps complete our understanding of him. He who initially describes war as “something horrific, dark, and suffocating” draws us into the concern of a grandfather after the defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War between Arabs and Israel: “How long are we supposed to hide and escape our fate? Neither death nor life is good anymore.” He explains to the audience how conflict is written into the destiny of our lives, such that if we don’t engage in conflict here, “we will end up fighting with our neighbors in the daily line to fetch a bucket of water, when the agency only opens the tap for two or three hours a day, and it never reaches everyone, or our sons will compensate for our losses in the real world with fights and conflicts in trivial games.” This is the other side of the same story where “the people of Hebron’s villages, with great effort, produced dairy, figs, and grapes, sold them in the city at the lowest prices, bought city products like soap and clothes at the highest prices, and returned.”

He understood that life is all of life. But the serious question remains: “When Arab countries with equipped armies failed to achieve results, what good is our resistance with empty hands?” The story of a successful prison strike is a good scene to show the power of empty hands when they are properly factored into the equation, encouraging us to believe that “only the men of a land liberate it”, not facilities or equipment. Sinwar’s pen guides us step by step toward the idea that the Palestinian struggle was not a quest for success through increasing armament; rather, on the contrary, with the failure of professional military operations and the transformation of the fedayeen’s hidden weapons into stones in the hands of the people, and then those stones turning into weapons, weapons that were no longer the lifeless weapons of before, a major transformation and military success were achieved. Here, the people’s involvement in Resistance is not a fanciful slogan, or in opposition to the logic of strengthening and arming militarily, but a desperate return to the only source of power for leaders who truly intend to fight and defeat an enemy that always has and will have the upper hand in using conventional economic-military weapons. Of course, this return to the people brings many demands and hardships, which usually lead others to abandon it.

He who believed, “Do not forget that the homeland is not just a story to be told, but a truth that must be lived,” carries the drama of the two sound perspectives of nationalism and Islamism to the final pages of his book, uniting them, portraying the people’s involvement in Resistance and its Islamic character as equal and parallel. Where does this companionship come from? Perhaps from the attention and understanding of the future and its priority; from the focus on the potential over the actual; from reliance on the hearts and hands that wield weapons, not the weapons themselves; from the faith that only someone who is a friend to their own people, meaning attuned to “them” and free from “us and I”, can bring Resistance to fruition. As in chapter 22 of Thorns and Carnations, we witness the story of the Palestinians’ dashed hopes, awaiting Saddam Hussein’s attack on Israel, while those more aware of global equations know that “the one who fights and defeats Israel has qualities that Saddam Hussein lacks.”

The hero of Thorns and Carnations grapples in solitude with whether the Palestinian cause is fundamentally different from other nations’ quests for freedom and independence, beyond their shared aspects. Though he doesn’t find a comprehensive answer, he reflects, “The Prophet could have gone directly from Mecca to the heavens. But God’s wisdom required that this journey pass through Jerusalem, to clarify the importance of Jerusalem on the path to the heavens for Muslims.” He knows that this intertwining of a dispossessed nation’s struggle with “the battle of faith, history, and existence” not only elevates the struggle but also raises religiosity to a new level, as seen in the story’s young characters becoming devout and praying.

But when the liberation of the land and living on it is our concern, it seems that adding the story of the Ascension and the heavens to the story of the land and earth makes the liberation of the land and life on earth possible. Here, the story of the earth is never exchanged for a story in the heavens; rather, the story of the earth, with a heavenly perspective on the earth, becomes real and solid. Perhaps nowhere in today’s world, like Gaza, has the unity of religious and national movements come to fruition.

6) Hope

Years ago, when a journalist asked Sinwar, “Doesn’t the stance of Arab countries make you hopeless?” instead of complaining about the Arabs, he gave a surprising response: “We, the Palestinian people, have decided to build a dam with the blood of our hearts and the bodies of our women and children to prevent the collapse of the Arab world.” He had realized that it is we who need jihad so that its grace may encompass our lives and save us from the despair dominating our existence and the collapse of our character.

This is the story of all humanity, but the people of this sacred land are more afraid than anyone of the consequences of not fighting. The Holy Quran also describes the rule and tradition of human wandering on earth due to avoiding stepping into the arena, centered around a story in this very land. When the people of Moses refused to join him in fighting and, based on their calculation of the balance of power, postponed it until their victory was assured, divine will decreed: “So it is forbidden to them for forty years; they will wander in the land” (Quran, Surah Al-Ma'idah - 26). For forty years, an entire lifetime, having a city was forbidden to them, and their fate was to wander the earth, without finding tranquility or being human.

The world has always rubbed our human inadequacy in our faces. As it progresses and larger, more complex systems gain power, this feeling grows stronger that there is no hope, and we, the small and weak, can do nothing in this vast world. The immense and unexpected work that Yahya Sinwar accomplished without relying on external power, even regardless of its content, created a point of hope in today’s world for all those who, on one hand, have been entangled with the harsh realities of politics, economics, and war, and on the other, still carry the unextinguished flame of human resilience and the possibility of their renewed glory and greatness in their hearts.

Forty years ago, Sinwar was also thinking of “majd” (glory) and, before the formation of Hamas, founded the Majd organization, Munazzamat al-Jihad wa al-Da’wa, with his friends. The penalty for this from Israel was centuries in prison. But the thought of glory multiplied and generated a power that freed him from prison after 23 years.

Those who rise with hope in an unfavorable and unacceptable situation may not achieve success in that scene. If it were otherwise, everyone, even the cowardly and half-men, would take this path. By disrupting a closed situation, we create an opportunity for opening. The world is not fundamentally divided into good and bad; neither is humanity. The world and humanity are in two states: closed and hopeless of goodness and salvation, or open and hopeful for goodness and salvation. Great people create great and rational hopes, enabling meaningful movement for humanity. Of course, this requires engaging in all the real dynamics of the era, which is a tremendous and difficult task, unrelated to propaganda of hope or narratives of progress. But suppose we expect a single act, without its continuation, a continuation brought about by engaging those devoted to it from others and future generations, to make this world good. In that case, we will not recognize any movement in history as a movement.

7) Death

Before Sinwar’s martyrdom, a short video of him circulated on social media about how he faced death, in which he firmly and resolutely said: “I have memorized the words of Imam Ali: ‘Which of my two days from death should I flee? The day it is not decreed, or the day it is decreed?’” A duality that rendered fleeing from death meaningless. The release of the footage of his martyrdom during an operation in the ruins of Ibn Sina Street in Rafah, as an ordinary soldier, and other videos later released of his repeated similar presence in the midst of battle, proved his genuine faith in that Alid wisdom.

He died as he lived: steadfast, with a weapon and a bandaged hand, fighting until his last breath, in solitude. The strange thing was that we, and the whole world, could witness those moments of his loneliness. It was fate that Israel needed to prove the identity of the man it had killed, and it was proven in the best and most beautiful way. That lifeless man, placing his body on a couch and throwing his final crutch at the technological beast confronting him, created the most eloquent scene of this war’s saga, and his solitary final moments became one of the most striking images of contemporary human life.

The Holy Quran recounts the story of Yahya thus: his father, Zechariah, who had grown old and was worried about his continuation on earth, asked God for the gift of a child. A special child named Yahya was granted to him, who was martyred. But he became the herald and preparer of the mission of Jesus Christ, who revived a dead world. Yahya continued...