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Israel tightens ring around still elusive Hamas leader

Sinwar’s ability to evade detection is based largely on his abandoning traceable electronic communications, taking a page from the playbook of Osama bin Laden.

By David Isaac, JNS

Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, 61, has abandoned the tunnels and taken to cross-dressing as a woman to escape detection, Britain’s Daily Express reported on Monday, leading social media wags to dub the mastermind behind the Oct. 7 massacre “Mrs. Dodgefire.”

So far, Sinwar has managed to evade the death blow Israel plans for him, a fate it has dealt out to many of Hamas’s leadership, including Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Mohammed Deif in Gaza.

Time doesn’t appear to be on Sinwar’s side.

“We have actually been minutes away more than once,” Shalom Ben Hanan, a former Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) official heavily involved in the hunt for Sinwar, told the Daily Express.

“As we have discovered through other elimination operations, Sinwar will not be sitting in underground tunnels or special underground zones for more than 24 to 36 hours at a time,” Ben Hanan added.

“He knows we can find such underground locations through advanced technology. And he knows if a mistake is made or we find sources to tell us where he is, he needs to be on the move—to avoid that mistake becoming fatal for him,” he said.

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Also in Israel’s favor is that Sinwar is unpopular with parts of the Gazan population. “They believe he has led them to ruin and it can only get worse the longer he stays alive,” an unnamed source told the paper.

Brig. Gen. Dan Goldfuss, commander of the IDF’s 98th Paratroopers Division, in an Aug. 11 interview with Channel 12 confirmed that the IDF only missed Sinwar by minutes in one raid:

“We were close. We were in his compound. We arrived at the compound underground. The compound was ‘hot.’ We also found a lot of money there. The coffee was still hot. The weapons had been dropped… minutes.”

In a Sunday feature on the hunt for Sinwar, The New York Times reported that he had left a bunker on Jan. 31, a few days before Israeli forces arrived.

The Israelis have released captured footage of Sinwar from October walking through a tunnel with some of his children.

Traceable electronics

Sinwar’s ability to evade detection is based largely on his abandoning traceable electronic communications, taking a page from the playbook of Osama bin Laden.

“He is believed to stay in touch with the organization he leads through a network of human couriers,” the Times said.

The paper interviewed more than two dozen Israeli and U.S. officials and found that both countries have invested “vast resources” into finding Sinwar.

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The Americans are monitoring communications and have helped Israel with ground-penetrating radar to map the enormous Hamas “metro” of tunnels.

“We’ve devoted considerable effort and resources to the Israelis for the hunt for the top leadership, particularly Sinwar,” U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said.

“We’ve had people in Israel sitting in the room with the Israelis working this problem set. And obviously we have a lot of experience hunting high-value targets.”

The U.S. is partly motivated by the hope that with Sinwar’s death, Israel could declare victory and end its military operations, the report noted.

The Shin Bet, along with the IDF’s Military Intelligence Directorate, has set up a special unit to track down a Cabinet-approved targeted-killing list of Hamas leaders, of whom Sinwar is the most important.

While he has managed to evade Israeli forces, the ring around him is tightening. In the first weeks of the war, Sinwar hid in the Hamas tunnels of Gaza City, but he has since moved to Khan Yunis.

He also used cellular and satellite phones, even speaking to Hamas members in Doha, but has since ceased to do so.

“American and Israeli spy agencies were able to monitor some of those calls but were not able to pinpoint his location,” the Times reported.

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He used to respond to messages within days, but hostage negotiation mediators and others say it now takes much longer to hear back from him.

And while he has leaned on a close group of Hamas political and military leaders in Gaza for policy decisions, that circle is shrinking, the Times noted.

Confidants of Sinwar killed include Deif, Marwan Issa, Rawhi Mushtaha, Izzeldin al-Haddad and Muhammad.