Qatari officials claim Sinwar is still alive and is in contact with them

This claim is at odds with a recent report that a senior Qatari official said Sinwar never had direct contact with Qatari mediators.

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

Several media sources, including Al-Arabiya and the Daily Mail, claim that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is alive and has renewed communication with Qatari mediators.

This claim is at odds with a recent Jerusalem Post report that a senior Qatari official said Sinwar never had direct communication with Qatari mediators, and that hostage deal and ceasefire negotiations were through senior Hamas political figure Khalil al-Hayah, not Sinwar.

There was also recent speculation that Sinwar had been killed because he had not been in communication with his usual contacts for some time.

Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind behind the October 7th terror attacks who took control of Hamas after the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, was last seen in grainy footage lurking in a Khan Younis tunnel.

There are reports that he surrounds himself with hostages as human shields to avoid assassination.

Kobi Michael, Sinwar’s former Shin Bet interrogator, told the Daily Mail that he carries “about 25kg of dynamite. Around him are at least 20 hostages.”

“A few times, we have had the chance to kill him, but if we do, he will kill all the hostages around him,” Michael said.

“Yahya Sinwar will never surrender,’ Michael told The London Times. ‘He’s dreaming about staying on as the leader of Hamas in Gaza. He’s thinking now about the next massacre. That man must be killed.”

Sinwar is said to avoid communicating through electronics, making him vulnerable to Israeli detection. Instead, he relies on couriers to deliver messages for him, and often, it takes days for people to hear back from him.

Last month, rumors circulated that Sinwar had been killed in an Israeli airstrike, but these speculations are not new and may once again be false.

Israeli journalist Ben Caspit quoted sources as saying: ‘There have also been times in the past when he disappeared and we thought he was dead, but then he reappeared.’