Yahya Sinwar

Yahya Ibrahim Hassan al-Sinwar (1962–2024) was a Palestinian writer and political leader born in the Khan Yunis refugee camp to a family exiled during the Nakba. A founding member of Hamas’s internal security wing and later its leader in Gaza, Sinwar spent 22 years in Israeli prisons, where he studied history, translated Hebrew texts, and wrote his only known literary work, The Thorn and the Carnation. He was known among fellow prisoners for his asceticism, discipline, and belief in the transformative power of resistance. His life – lived between the cell, the bunker, the pulpit and the battlefield – was marked by contradiction: militant and mystic, strategist and storyteller. He was killed in October 2024, steadfast and defiant to the end, during the Gaza Genocide.