“Even then, he looked and carried himself like a leader,” Bitton recalled. “He was thin, tough, and very extreme.” There was tension in jail between the militant Islamists of Gaza and those from the West Bank, which was ruled by the Palestinian Authority initially headed by Yasser Arafat and then by his successor, Mahmoud Abbas. Sinwar viewed even the most militant members of the Palestinian Authority as soft and undisciplined. Above all, they were traitors to Islam for having agreed to share with the Jews holy land that God had given exclusively to Muslims.

Sinwar and his lieutenants, Tawfik Abu Naim and Rawhi Mushtaha, now all senior Hamas figures, were “like an army” inside the prison, Bitton recalled. An Islamic band of brothers, they enforced rules, gave orders, and held secret elections for Hamas’ “majlis,” its ruling council inside the prison. They communicated with one another and with fellow militants outside the jail through messages and tiny plastic cellphones smuggled into the jail by visitors—lawyers, wives, babies. The contraband was concealed in diapers, in women’s bras, and in their vaginas.

“In those days, we didn’t routinely or thoroughly search women or babies or even surveil conversations between lawyers and their clients,” Bitton said, recalling these early examples of suicidal democracy. “We were so naive.”

Sinwar studied his enemy assiduously. He read Israeli newspapers, took classes in Jewish history through the prison’s “open university,” and spoke to Bitton about Hamas’ goals—the expulsion of all Jews from Palestine, the duty to implement God’s laws as given to Muhammad on all sacred Muslim soil. Numerous efforts to recruit him in prison failed. “The struggle continued inside the prison,” Bitton said. Sinwar was not married then, and he had few visitors. “Hamas and the struggle were his life.”