Sinwar had reasons for his grievances against the occupation. He was born into a refugee camp in Khan Younis, the child of parents whose home had been stolen by Zionists during the Nakba.[7] In 1967, when Sinwar was four years old, Israel took command of the Gaza Strip after the Six-Day War. Thereafter, Sinwar and his family were subjected to the daily humiliations of life under Israeli occupation.
In his young adulthood, he was detained by Israeli forces multiple times for involvement with student political groups, and by his early twenties, Sinwar was involved in armed resistance. According to Israeli courts and Western reporting, in this period of his life, he tortured and killed people—including two Israeli soldiers and twelve Palestinians whom he suspected of collaborating with Israel. Now once again, I’ll condemn torture. Genocide bad; torture bad. Bear in mind, however, that the information that led to Sinwar’s conviction was also extracted by Israeli “interrogation.” Meaning torture. Israeli forces torture Palestinian prisoners.
Sinwar spent the following twenty-two years in Israeli prisons, where he taught himself Hebrew, studied Jewish history, wrote a novel, and once led a hunger strike of 1,600 prisoners. In 2011, his brother had him freed through a hostage swap in which Israel traded one Israeli soldier for over 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. A hostage swap. That’s as deep as I’m going to dive into Yahya Sinwar’s biography, because I have absolutely no qualifications or additional information with which to dig deeper. But even from these surface-level facts, reported by every mainstream Western outlet, you can understand Sinwar’s logic when it comes to October 7th. He got free through a hostage deal, so maybe another one could free his 5,000 Palestinian comrades who were still being held in Israeli detention on October 7th, 2023. He was trying to pay it forward. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that Sinwar was more motivated by a desire to free his people than to kill a bunch of Jews.