Jon Elmer - The Life of Yahya Sinwar (2024)

Jon Elmer: We will start the resistance report as ever in Rafah. And this week, starting in Rafah is particularly important because it was the site of Yahya Sinwar's death, fighting as a fighter. We can see here the map of the Gaza Strip. In the resistance report today, we're going to cover from Rafah through Khan Yunus up through the Nizarim corridor, which is still being targeted every single day. And then we're going to focus on the north, of course, in Jabalia and the Jabalia refugee camp, which is not on this map, but the Jabalia refugee camp is just south of Jabalia, Balad, the city, and it forms essentially a contiguous population center from the north of Jabalia all the way through the refugee camp and into the city of Gaza City. And to the south is the beach refugee camp, the Shati refugee camp. This is a continuous strip of city. If you were to be driving as, say, a foreign journalist from Toronto on his first trip, you wouldn't know. I didn't know when I was leaving Jabalia and entering Gaza City. You don't necessarily, I mean, you can tell the refugee camps, of course. Um, and the downtown core of Gaza city is, is a major Metro, uh, metropolis. So that's obvious to tell, but I'm just saying that the, the demarcations of these they're fighting in Jabalia, they're fighting in Gaza city, the lines bleed, uh, um, literally and figuratively across those borders. So, um, just to, just to say that when we get to Jabalia, but we're going to start in Rafa because. We've been talking about Rafah for the last five and a half months. I've given you guys every single week on this show all the details necessary to understand what is going on along the Philadelphia corridor where Israel is attempting to set up and hold the terrain to lock in the Gaza Strip, the way they were working on the tunnels, and the way that a week, two weeks ago, 18 days ago, up and left in the middle of the night, the 162nd Brigade, took the brigades that were in Rafah and moved them up to the siege on Jabalia. And in doing so, they left behind just a small division with one brigade that is a training brigade. But this is what they have done to Rafah. Let's look at these next few pictures. These were put together through satellite imagery collected by Evan Hill uh who works at the washington post don't blame him for that but yeah it does solid uh open source uh geospatial work and you could just see like you can't even really describe this it's like you took a physical eraser and just destroyed the entire society of rafa the refugee camps are just eliminated the destruction is total And you're going to see that in the situation with Sinwar. Sinwar was 150 meters away from an Israeli military outpost that the training brigade was situated at. He was 150 meters from there. That post is 800 meters from the Egyptian border. And so you're talking about the Philadelphia corridor is the story. This area that we've talked about on this show week after week for six months ends up becoming the place where Yahya Sinwar is. He's meeting with commanders. He's in a tactical vest. He's got weapons. We'll get more into that. But let's show the footage that everybody has seen at this point. The Israelis released this footage. of this drone entering the building that had already been tank shelled. And looking around, if you look dead center, you can see sitting in the chair, which is symbolic already because Yahya Sinwar sat in a chair in his demolished house in 2021, and that became an iconic picture. You can look at him here with his arm tourniquet because the bottom half of his arm has been blown off. You can see he's got his face covered with a makeshift keffiyeh. And you can see he's holding a stick. And he's going to pick this stick up and throw it at the drone that's hovering here. The Israelis are in with the drone because when they came with their force, Sinwar threw two grenades at them and they ran away. They broke contact is the military term, broke contact. To tell you that in lay terms, they ran away. They have no interest in fighting in any kind of face-to-face combat, even with somebody who's been just hit by a tank shell. So they break contact, they go back to their outpost 150 meters away, and they fly this drone to see where the person in the building is. And they see this person, they have no idea who they're looking at here. The reason why the training brigade, in the army for nine months, a platoon commander's training school, is going here with a drone from that outpost. They have no idea who they're killing here. And when they see Sinwar throw the stick at them, they do what Israel does. They called in a tank shell and fired a tank shell and dropped the house on top of Sinwar. That happened at three o'clock and they first see him. I'll just go through the whole story. At 10 a.m., On the day before his death was announced, his death was announced on the 17th. He was killed on the 16th in the middle of the afternoon. At 10 a.m. in the morning, from their outpost, flying drones, this training unit sees movement. They don't see fighters. They see movement. And because Rafa is supposed to be depopulated, flattened, Their genocidal army sees people moving and immediately fires tank shells at them. That's how Israel behaves. They bury the building and they move on with their day. That's what they did in this case, too. They buried Sinwar in the building. They dropped the roof on top of him and they went back to the base in the middle of the afternoon. never filed a report, never told the Shabak that they killed maybe a senior leader or even bothered to find out who that leader is, which is something that fits with Israeli tactics throughout this war. They don't do battle damage assessments, but they happen to do a battle damage assessment sensitive site exploitation is how other militaries call it basically where you go back to the target that you hit and you see who you killed and you attempt to get intelligence from And Israel doesn't do that. And that's why every single commander that they say they kill, they offer no evidence for it at all, including, by the way, the commander of the Tell al-Sultan battalion that was with Yahya Sinwar, Mahmoud Hamdan. Israel told us they killed Mahmoud Hamdan in September. They didn't do a battle damage assessment. They didn't go and look. They just tell you, yeah, we killed this person. We killed Mohammed Daif. We killed Marwan Issa. There's no proof of that. Kassam has not acknowledged their deaths. Kassam has acknowledged the deaths of leading figures. And so this story is just remarkable. It's a complete accident that it's Sinwar. It's the likelihood of this attack just dropping the building on him and him becoming one of the 12 or 13,000 people that are buried in rubble that nobody can get out from the rubble because Israel doesn't allow heavy machinery to operate. They blow it all up, as we've seen. That's why people are digging with their hands to try to get people out. So the extreme unlikelihood of Israel actually finding Sinwar. And you can see him there in that freeze frame. He's sitting upright in his chair. He's got his arm tourniquet. He's sitting defiantly in the chair with his face covered. He's in a tactical vest. He's holding weapons. He's holding grenades, which he threw at the force. He's holding an AK-47 and he's holding a Glock pistol. and the glock pistol that he's holding is the glock pistol that was captured by kasam and presented to sinwar in 2018 during a very consequential uh foiled kasam raid uh sorry uh sarat maktal raid israeli special forces raid that was attempting a clandestine operation to penetrate Gaza and to plant listening devices to try to get into the closed network that Kassam, under Sinwar's leadership, perfected to have a closed network that the Israelis can't get intelligence, not like Hezbollah, where Israel announced the names of the Hezbollah commanders and Hezbollah confirms the names. We don't have any confirmation of any senior commanders except for two. Ayman Nofal, who is the central middle camps commander, division commander uh and ahmed gandur who was the northern uh division commander those are the only two confirmed um kills in battle that israel has had um and that kasam has claimed they claimed the sinuar death the next day but this is happening in the middle of the afternoon the day before israel announces it and it's just um the fact that it's an accident The fact that it wasn't because of any failing of the resistance. In fact, what you have here is the head of the Politburo, although he is a Qassam Brigades founder and was the founder of the Majid, the internal security system that Hamas built that became ultimately part of the Qassam Brigades. He's a military man, Sinwar. But he's the Politburo head of Hamas. He's the overall head of Hamas. And we see him in a battle-destroyed area communicating one-on-one with commanders of those battalions. And it opens up so many questions about where Senoir, who we were told was hiding in a tunnel, surrounded by captives, which we all on this show always said was a lie, because we know that he met with the captives on his first day, on the captives' first day on October 7th. sinuar went in his perfect hebrew and spoke to the captives and he said to the civilians he said um we'll take care of you we you know you're in i promise to take care of you you're in our hands you're our guests you'll go home in the next day or two that's what sinuar told um told the captives after october 7th and now we see him on the front lines 150 meters from an israeli position communicating with the important battalion commanders fighting as a soldier. And Israel released this video thinking that they had shown a success which is just, it's so absurd. I can't help but laugh because the entire world saw this video. And this video is going to be iconic for generations of Palestinian struggle. Sinwar has now set the bar for leadership of the Palestinian national movement so high that you have to fight to the last moment with anything that you have in your hand, with a stick, even when your arm has been blown off. You reach for a stick, you sit up in the chair upright in the exact same way as his iconic photo when they destroyed, Israel destroyed his house in 2021. There's just so many elements of this story that are failures for the Israelis. failures for the Americans who have poured tens of billions of dollars into this war. They have their own American military and intelligence officers embedded within the Israeli, trying to get any kind of signals intelligence, human intelligence, and they failed. They never have any idea where Sinwar is, but Sinwar is communicating. He's doing the ceasefire talks. He's writing letters once he became the overall head of the Politburo after the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh. He's writing letters to the Ansar Allah movement. He's writing letters to Nasrallah and to Hezbollah. And so he is doing everything the Israelis couldn't find him doing in part because of what Justin said, because he's lived this life of security that puts operational security as the primary concern for a resistance fighter. And he implemented that on the ground for the Palestinians. And the fact that he is holding the gun The gun is captured from one of those Israeli special forces who tried, hidden as Palestinians, dressed up as Palestinians, to come into Gaza and plant listening devices because Israel knew as far back as 2018 that they had no, they did not have a line in on Qasem's communications. They were completely dark. And that is a critical element of the war that we've been watching for the last 385 days, including October 7th, that took Israel by surprise in such a fundamental way that it left them reeling. That was because of operational security that came from Sinwar, that came from prison, where he was a prison leader. and elected those are it's an elected job the prisoners elect sin war to be the prison leader and he teaches you know when he came out in the he was released in the gilad shalit prisoner exchange which was a cross-border operation executed by his brother muhammad to capture the tank gunner and bring him back into gaza during that prisoner exchange Um, said that he didn't want to be part of the prisoner exchange that he wanted to stay in the prison. He wanted his other, uh, comrades to get out before him. That was his disposition. And ultimately that didn't happen because the prisoners said, no, you're going, uh, you're going out. And when he got out, the first thing he said was, uh, Israel thought that prison was my grave, but it was my university. And he immediately set about after 2011, as soon as he arrived in Gaza, he said, I promised everyone that was left behind in prison that we will get them out, that we will free them. And he also makes consistent analogies between Gaza's siege and a prison environment to liberate Gaza, to break the siege is a prison break. And that's a term that became commonly used to describe the October 7 operation was that it was a prison break. And so the connections between those, the fact that he's throwing grenades at Israeli soldiers, that Israeli soldiers run away, send drones, and then follow up with another tank shell that kills him after this still photo I made here of him. They dropped a tank shell and dropped the house and killed him. He was killed as if he was any other fighter. And from the Palestinian side, he was just any other fighter. And that's what made him a leader that will go down in history as for what he did, and this video that the Israelis showed, which they believed, it just shows how disconnected they are from all of this, from their genocide, that they believed that this was a win for them, when really you just have every single solitary child in all of Palestine acting this scene out already. You could just imagine it. all over Jenin in the north, all the way down, you know, to the internally displaced all over Gaza, that the kids see this and what this does for their morale to see their leader fighting from the front, advancing from the front. He didn't try to get away. He didn't try to run away. Once he was engaged in contact by the Israelis, he fought. And he fought with a weapon that was captured from an Israeli special forces soldier and was presented to Sinwar. You may recognize the gun from some famous speeches of Sinwar when he's speaking on the stage. And the one time in 2011 when he says to Israel, if you want to assassinate me, I'm about to walk home. I'm leaving in 10 minutes. And he stands on the stage and he tucks the gun in his pants with the silencer. That's the gun that was captured in this 2018 foiled raid that counterintelligence operations of Qassam of the sort that were in the 1980s, Sinwar's job within the movement before Hamas was Hamas. And as Justin said, when Hamas was seen as being slow to form, Sinwar's in jail, in the early to mid 80s before Hamas exists. He meets Salah Shahada, who's the founder of the Qassam Brigades. He is a follower of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. And so he gets the most important portfolio, which is internal security. The Palestinian revolution cannot function if there's collaborators working with the Israelis amid their people. And between the years of him going to jail in the 1980s and the October 7th operation, Palestinians virtually entirely cleared collaborators and made it a non-factor in their resistance. And that's something that SINWAR began. That was a project that began with SINWAR. Ultimately, Sinwar is arrested at the beginning of the First Intifada in 1988. He's actually arrested in Jenin. He's not arrested in Gaza. He's arrested in Jenin, where he's moving through the West Bank, setting up the cells, the underground cells that would become the Qassam Brigades. He's setting up those cells. Israel arrests him for... for basically for petty, for activism, for throwing stones, for being in demos. They don't arrest him because they think he's the mastermind of setting up the Kassam Brigades. And so he's in prison on small charges. And once the Intifada starts to take shape and the Kassam Brigades start to emerge as underground cells and that rise up, from the underground and capture Israeli soldiers in order to exchange them for prisoners who are in Israeli jails. The linchpin of the Palestinian national movement of the armed struggle is to capture Israeli soldiers and exchange them for Palestinian prisoners. So once Israel realizes that this has happened, that Qassam has built these underground networks, That's when Sinwar is then retried. He's retried and given multiple life sentences. He's tried for operations that he was said to have planned or that existed even when he was in prison. Israel does that with all the leaders. That's how you have sentences of 17 life sentences. They give the leadership. They take that all the numbers of the killed or captured soldiers, and they just tack it on to their file, and Sinwar was that way. So even Israel themselves didn't know Sinwar was the man that he was when he was arrested. So that's an interesting fact. And when he's released from prison, as I said, in the Gilad Shalit, Gilad Shalit is captured in 2006. The prisoner exchange is in 2011. He comes out of prison and immediately joins the Hamas Politburo. He becomes effectively the defense minister who's in charge of the Qassam Brigades. And when in 2017 he's elected, all these positions are elected. He's elected in 2017 as the overall head of Hamas in Gaza in 2017. At that point, he is the key bridge between the Hamas movement, the political movement, and the Qassam Brigades, the armed wings. which is much more popular than Hamas within Palestinian society and a natural bridge that he took from defense minister. You know, he didn't come out of prison. First of all, before he came out of prison, Israel said, you all have to sign in the Shalit deal. You all have to sign this paper that says you won't go back to resistance activities. And Sinwar said, no, we're not signing that. And as the leader in the prison, Sinwar said, we're not signing that. And so nobody signed it. And as the prisoner exchange was happening, Israel was really upset about that because they saw it as a big loss that they couldn't get these guys to sign away that they would go into retirement. And, you know, Sinwar wanted to live a life, maybe wanted to go into retirement, but did the exact opposite. He took the portfolio of the most important resistance movement within the national liberation struggle, And he worked to align them with the Hamas movement. When he first came out of prison, he wanted immediately reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas. He was a key player in the 2004 prisoners document, which was attempting to do that reconciliation, especially after the and then followed on by the coup attempt by the US and Israel to overthrow the Hamas government in Gaza. So those elements of his story are a critical part of the trajectory of the national liberation struggle that you see today that culminates in October 7th. October 7th is a Yahya-Sinwar operation. It's not that nobody else in Hamas would have done that operation, but his leadership allowed the connection between Hamas and Qassam and to have an agreement on a strategy which he took very seriously. He was a student of Israeli society, Israeli military intelligence, Israeli military strategy itself. And he, in the Sun Tzu sense of know your enemy, know yourself, he believes in those so critically. So all of these things together, taken together, culminating in him being in that chair in a tactical vest, holding an Israeli weapon that was captured in a counterintelligence raid. that prevented Israel from tapping the lines, the internal lines that have allowed this war to continue because Israel cannot break the Qassam Brigades. They cannot break their communication. They cannot assassinate their leaders and their mid-level leaders are all still intact. The key leaders, his brother, Muhammad, who will likely take over the Qassam Brigades or at least take significant roles Unless it's true that Mohammed Daif and Marwan Issa, the top two commanders of the Qassam Brigades, have been assassinated, which Qassam has not said and Hamas has said it's not true. And Israel's provided no proof for it, but they've carried on with that story. In any case, Mohamed Sinwar, who was not in prison, he was an operations chief in Gaza, his brother, he has the authority and the following and the operational success to carry on what Yahya Sinwar led. And so, Sinwar's death is not a defeat in any way of viewing it. You lose an incredible leader for the Palestinian national struggle, but it's going to inspire and show the way for generations of Palestinians that will take over the leadership of the Palestinians. When you're talking with Justin about the Oslo process, Who's the Palestinian leader that can now sign away rights for Palestinians when their previous leader fought covered in dust with his arm tourniquet, throwing a stick at a drone on the front lines, communicating with commanders? It's just a remarkable story. I mean, we could talk about Yahya Sinwar for hours and Maybe we will do that in the coming shows, or maybe we'll focus on it in the coming show. But the important thing to understand is that trajectory, the role of him as an internal counterintelligence agent that Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Salah Shahada, the founder of the Qassam Brigades, would see in him the person to do that. And then he would go at that time and travel throughout the West Bank such that he's arrested in Jenin, you know, the most historic place of resistance other than Jabalia in the Palestinian national cause. And if anything, it's more so because Jenin is the place where Sheikh Izzedine al-Qassam was killed And that was really the beginning of the Palestinian national armed struggle. We're going to talk more about that later because I have an Abu Ubaidah speech that came out on October 7th that talks about the loss of your leaders, that talks about assassination. So yeah, that's Yahya Sinmar in a little nutshell and the way that that all interplays with that final drone scene Is just is is really remarkable and I wanted to show you that so let's let's look at the next the next videos the shalit exchange released a Thousand and twenty six other people besides him so besides sin war so look at look at the the house that he's in That's the house that he's meeting with the battalion commander of the telesultan battalion Israel said that they had killed the Tell al-Sultan battalion leader when they were checkmarking boxes for their local audience to say the war in Rafah is done. Just look at that destruction, the level of destruction. We have another one here of the same thing looking from inside the house. And you can just see the view from inside the house. They just completely flattened Rafah. And that's what those satellite images from before are attempting to show you. And so next we have here the martyr poster that Hamas released. And we have Ismail Haniyeh, Salah al-Ruri, who was killed in Beirut earlier on in the war, and Yahya Sinwar. And it says what Hamas has said many times throughout this war. We offer our leaders before our soldiers. they're advancing, they're not retreating, they're fighting, you know, they're calling, they're already calling Yahya Sinwar the fighting sheikh because of the way that he went, went out in battle. So that's just a critical, critical part of this. And let's look at the next one because Hamas released a video just to show you some of the historic moments of Sinwar. When he comes out of prison, he gives these speeches, important speeches you see him here walking amongst the people of Gaza you know he's just he's not a polished politician he's a straight you can just tell by the way he's articulating that he's a straight shooter but he's a tactical genius and Israeli interrogators there's his little son Ibrahim with him there There they are in prison. And this is the critical moment. And it's not always clear to everybody, but Palestinian prison isn't where you're sent away, isolated from your society and isolated from the movement. You can see them here walking. They're having these meetings, these top-level meetings with senior Qasem figures inside the prison. And you can see, even though their conditions are brutal, You can see that they're all living together. And this is a crucial victory that was won inside the prison in the years that Sinwar was in leadership in the prison. The hunger strikes forced Israel to not have people be in solitary, to allow the movements to to be together inside the prison so that the prison could become a university, so that they could have lecture talks, lecture time, study time. Sinwar translated books from Hebrew to Arabic about military intelligence, and then they would study those. And that's what he's saying. They thought um they thought prison israel thought prison was our grave because he was sentenced to multiple life sentences the idea was that he was never going to get out his brother executes this raid and effectively gets him out of prison and alters that one capture of one soldier alters the trajectory of the palestinian national movement in ways that we'll be talking about for generations to come it's a remarkable uh aspect of the story and Yeah, the one famous line was after the 2021 war, a journalist asked him in a press conference, because Benny Gantz, the prime minister, said that he was He was going to kill Sinwar and Sinwar said, if you threaten it and don't carry it out, your image will be tarnished. As for your threats, I have appeared in front of the media many times, it is true, but I will move freely and normally and I am present and after a while, you will all leave and I'll go to my office, I'll run my tasks, I'll get in the car with some of my men, I'll go to my house and they know where I live because it's obvious. And after the, I think it was after the 22 war, he was giving a speech like that. And he said, I'm going to walk home. He was going to a prayer tent for a martyr's tent for a fallen commander. And he said he was going to walk there and it'll take me 10 minutes to walk there. And that's the footage that you see of him walking down the street. Yeah, just a remarkable leader. And the way that his death happened, is something that you just couldn't make it up. Justin was talking about novels. If you wrote it that way, I don't think people would be able to believe you. Let's look at number eight tomorrow because Abu Ubaidah handled this related to Nasrallah. This is his October 7th speech. He said, When have assassinations ever been the end of liberation and resistance movements anywhere in the world, especially in the history and present of our Palestinian and Arab revolution? If assassinations were victories, anti-colonial resistance would have ended with the assassination of Sheikh Izzedine al-Qassam in the woods of Yabad near Jenin 90 years ago. And if assassinations were victories, the al-Qassam brigades would not have carried out the Al-Aqsa flood operation on October 7th, 20 years after the assassination of Hamas's and Qassam's most prominent founders. And he's speaking here of Sheikh Yassin and Abdulaziz Rantezi. He's also speaking of Qassam commanders, the founding commanders like Salah Shahada, who I spoke of before, and Adnan Al Ghul, who was the founder, along with Yahya Ayyash, of the development of the indigenous arms development of the Qassam Brigades that came to fruition in this war of attrition where uh palestinians are able to fight a war of attrition now 380 days on and you're going to see in the jabalia segment that i do in a few minutes that they're still firing all of those weapons a year into battle in fact i think we're going to show you a video where they're that's pretty clear proof they're still making them and are ready for this battle of attrition so that's yaya sinwar in rafa But the RAFA brigade is still fighting. So let's look at number nine tomorrow because we showed last week this operation they're showing here. A booby trap. I broke this down on the show last week. It's a booby trap south west of Conunis, north west of, or sorry, east, south east of Conunis, north east of RAFA along the buffer zone. And they blew that up. So that was part one of this ambush. The Palestinians have a spider-like tunnel network. So blowing up that part of the tunnel didn't change anything. And five days later, the Israelis go back to the same place and the Palestinians see them go back to the same place and go and rig up the tunnel a second time with barrel bombs. And you can watch, if you watch at the top here over to the left of the two, maybe we can loop it around again. You can see the soldier enter the tunnel. Here they are inside the tunnel. You can see a couple of shawads here. You can see a barrel bomb. Oh no, here it is. Watch the two on the left, the soldiers in the upper left that are standing on the berm. They're going to step into the tunnel. You can see the many, many triangles. But you'll see the soldier disappear down into the tunnel as he goes down there. Disappears down into the tunnel. There's multiple of them down into the tunnel. And every time we see these operations now, we have to think, was Yahya Sinwar talking? Was he standing behind the guys when they had that piece of paper? He's not in the tunnel behind a desk being a Politburo member. He's a fighter on the front line moving around, communicating with battalion commanders. Israelis go back to the same spot in Al Rayyan and get blown up twice in five days. They never learn, and the resistance is always one step ahead in these. So that's against an engineering unit in Rafah.