Do we like them?

Do we like Yahya Sinwar?

Our score: 0 out of 10. He ran an armed group behind an attack that killed mostly civilians, and he admitted killing suspected collaborators himself; no real good turned up.

Yahya Sinwar was born in 1962 in a refugee camp in Khan Younis, Gaza, and joined Hamas early. He was Hamas's top leader in Gaza from 2017, and became its overall leader in August 2024 after Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Iran. He died a couple of months later.

His early reputation came from enforcing Hamas's internal rule. He led its security arm, which was set up to purge informants for Israel, and he admitted to killing 12 suspected collaborators. That earned him the nickname “The Butcher of Khan Younis”.

Israel arrested him in the late 1980s and sentenced him to four life terms, including over the killing of two Israeli soldiers. He walked free in 2011 in the prisoner swap for soldier Gilad Shalit. He spent decades behind bars and still came out running the show.

The harm check is brutal. Sinwar is described as the chief architect of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, which killed mostly civilians and triggered the Gaza war. In May 2024 the ICC prosecutor said he had reasonable grounds to believe Sinwar bore criminal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity. That is a request for warrants, not a verdict, and judges still had to decide.

The end came in October 2024, in what the Israeli military said was a gun battle in southern Gaza. Troops did not at first realise who they had killed, and identification was later confirmed by dental records, fingerprints and DNA. Israel released drone footage of his last moments.

On the good stuff, we came up empty. No charity, no kind act and no stand at a personal cost turned up in the reporting we read. Hamas officials said after his death that the group would only become stronger, but that is the group talking, not a good deed.