{"id":111617,"date":"2024-03-19T18:05:33","date_gmt":"2024-03-19T16:05:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=111617"},"modified":"2024-03-19T17:06:12","modified_gmt":"2024-03-19T15:06:12","slug":"23-05-94","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=111617","title":{"rendered":"Saving Sinwar"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Saving Sinwar<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

JUDITH MILLER<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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An Israeli who spent \u2018hundreds of hours\u2019 with his country\u2019s most deadly foe assesses his next move<\/strong><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n

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\nYahya Sinwar in Gaza, 2022 \/ YOUSEF MASOUD\/SOPA IMAGES\/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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The Palestinian in the clinic at one of Israel\u2019s highest security prisons near Beersheba had a persistent pain in the back of his neck. He trembled and had trouble walking. Yuval Bitton, then a 28-year-old dentist just a year out of medical school, suspected that his patient might be suffering from a C.V.A., an ischemic cerebrovascular accident, resulting from a life-threatening brain tumor. \u201cHe needs to be hospitalized, immediately,\u201d Bitton advised the prison doctors.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Dr. Bitton\u2019s diagnosis was quickly confirmed at the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba. The surgery took hours. The prisoner survived. When he returned to the prison, he thanked Bitton and the rest of the prison medical staff for having saved his life\u2014in excellent Hebrew.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The year was 2004. The patient was Yahya Sinwar, the Palestinian who in 2017 would become the leader of Hamas in Gaza and subsequently the mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel in which 1,200 mostly Israeli civilians died and 240 were taken hostage.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Bitton described the fateful incident and what he said were \u201chundreds of hours\u201d of conversations with Sinwar in prison in the ensuing years when I met him last week in a peaceful garden in a Tel Aviv suburb, a world away from the Israeli prisons in which the Hama<\/span>s leader was held for 22 years prior to his release in 2011.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2018Sinwar didn\u2019t care how many Palestinians would die for their cause. There was no flexibility, no room for compromise.\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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\u201cEven then, he looked and carried himself like a leader,\u201d Bitton recalled. \u201cHe was thin, tough, and very extreme.\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Sinwar and his lieutenants, Tawfik Abu Naim and Rawhi Mushtaha, now all senior Hamas figures, were \u201clike an army\u201d inside the prison, Bitton recalled. An Islamic band of brothers, they enforced rules, gave orders, and held secret elections for Hamas\u2019 \u201cmajlis<\/em>,\u201d 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\u2014lawyers, wives, babies. The contraband was concealed in diapers, in women\u2019s bras, and in their vaginas.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIn those days, we didn\u2019t routinely or thoroughly search women or babies or even surveil conversations between lawyers and their clients,\u201d Bitton said, recalling these early examples of suicidal democracy. \u201cWe were so naive.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Sinwar studied his enemy assiduously. He read Israeli newspapers, took classes in Jewish history through the prison\u2019s \u201copen university,\u201d and spoke to Bitton about Hamas\u2019 goals\u2014the expulsion of all Jews from Palestine, the duty to implement God\u2019s laws as given to Muhammad on all sacred Muslim soil. Numerous efforts to recruit him in prison failed. \u201cThe struggle continued inside the prison,\u201d Bitton said. Sinwar was not married then, and he had few visitors. \u201cHamas and the struggle were his life.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Sinwar\u2019s life has been shaped by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Born in 1962 in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Egyptian-ruled Gaza, he got his bachelor\u2019s degree in Arabic studies from the Islamic University of Gaza, which was founded in 1978 by two men who a decade later would create Hamas. He grew close to one of them\u2014Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Hamas\u2019 co-founder and spiritual guide\u2014and rose quickly in the Hamas ranks.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Judith Miller<\/strong>, Tablet Magazine\u2019s theater critic, is a former\u00a0New York Times\u00a0Cairo bureau chief and investigative reporter. She is also the author of the memoir\u00a0The Story: A Reporter\u2019s Journey<\/a>.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Saving Sinwar JUDITH MILLER An Israeli who spent \u2018hundreds of hours\u2019 with his country\u2019s most deadly foe assesses his next move . Yahya Sinwar in Gaza, 2022 \/ YOUSEF MASOUD\/SOPA IMAGES\/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES The Palestinian in the clinic at one of Israel\u2019s highest security prisons near Beersheba had a persistent pain in the back […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111617"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=111617"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":111635,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111617\/revisions\/111635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=111617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=111617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=111617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}