Senior Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, speaks during a conference in Gaza City, on Nov. 4, 2019. Photo by Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90
After months of radio silence, with only intermittent messages sent to Hamas officials in Qatar, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar published three public statements in recent days, despite being chased through the tunnels of Gaza by Israeli soldiers and intelligence.
A report in The Wall Street Journal on Monday revealed that Sinwar stays in contact and, in fact, stays alive thanks to “a complex system of couriers, codes and handwritten notes.”
Since giving the green light for his forces to launch the Oct. 7 invasion and the ensuing massacre, Sinwar hasn’t been seen in public. IDF commanders say they have been chasing him through the Gaza Strip’s underground tunnel network, narrowly missing the terrorist chief several times.
Sinwar has continued to direct Hamas’ fighting strategy against Israel and has led the negotiations for a hostage release and truce deal with Israel via messages sent to the Hamas leaders based in Qatar or directly to mediators in Egypt and Qatar.
Speaking with the WSJ, one mediator provided insight into the complex web of couriers who transport messages from Sinwar out of the Gaza Strip.
According to the source, Sinwar will write out his messages by hand, using a code that varies according to “different recipients, circumstances and times,” and is based on a system that Sinwar developed with other inmates during his jail time in Israeli prisons.
A message is then delivered to a trusted Hamas operative, before being passed along by several couriers, including Palestinian civilians.
When the message reaches the end of the line, a Hamas operative, or possibly a representative of the mediators who entered the Gaza Strip, uses a phone or another method to transmit the message to Hamas leadership abroad.
Sinwar has raised the secrecy of his communications even further since Israeli forces killed senior Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut, Lebanon in early January, and now almost completely shuns electronic communications in favor of handwritten notes.
“I’m quite sure this is one of the prominent reasons that the IDF didn’t find him,” Michael Milshtein, a former head of Palestinian affairs for Israeli military intelligence, told the WSJ. “He really keeps all his basic personal patterns of behavior very strict.”
Despite these new insights, it remains unclear how exactly Sinwar manages to communicate while constantly being on the move. While negotiators have said that Sinwar was unreachable for weeks at times, on other occasions, he was able to communicate almost instantaneously.
During a meeting between mediators in June, Sinwar communicated in real-time, they told the WSJ. One possible method is by using Hamas’ landline telephone network in its underground tunnel system that has not yet been destroyed by Israeli airstrikes.
In the past, Sinwar has arranged phone calls with mediators by using codes to set a time and date, according to the report.
Sinwar’s first public statement during the ongoing war came late last October, when he offered to exchange all of the Israeli hostages for all Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli jails.
After the elimination of Ismail Haniyeh in Iran’s capital city Tehran in August, Sinwar was elected to replace him as Hamas’ political leader.
In his new role, he has already published three public statements, including congratulatory messages sent to Algeria’s new president, to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and to the Houthis in Yemen.
His new post as political leader means it is “natural for Sinwar to send these kinds of messages,” Ibrahim al-Madhoun, an analyst close to Hamas, told the New York Times.
“The letters are an affirmation of his new tasks,” said al-Madhoun. “He’s fighting a war, but he’s also undertaking his responsibilities in his new role.”
However, the increase in communications could also provide Israeli intelligence with more clues to finally capture or kill the elusive mastermind of the Oct. 7 massacre.
