On Thursday afternoon, Yuval Bitton was sitting down to eat at his sister’s place in southern Israel. The occasion was Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles, but the anniversary of October 7th and the ongoing horror of the war in Gaza and beyond insured that there was little sense of celebration at the table.
Bitton, a soft-spoken man in his late fifties, had become famous in the past year. Beginning in the nineties, he had worked in Israeli prisons, first as a dentist, then as an intelligence official; there he came to know well a long-term prisoner named Yahya Sinwar. The two men were hardly friends, but they spent, by Bitton’s accounting, hundreds of hours in conversation.
Sinwar, as a security enforcer for Hamas, in Gaza, spent more than two decades in prison for murdering Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel. He was eager to perfect his Hebrew, to learn as much as he could about Israel. He sought out Bitton and others as part of his education. He made no attempt to conceal his ideology or his capacity for violence. Sinwar told Bitton—as he told many Israelis and Palestinians—that he was devoted to armed struggle, the liberation of Palestine, and the eradication of the State of Israel. If tens of thousands of Palestinians had to be sacrificed to the cause, so be it. “He made no secret of his ruthlessness,” Bitton said.
As the Sukkot meal began, Bitton received a string of grotesque photographs on his phone: closeups of a gaunt Palestinian man with sharp cheekbones, his mouth open, a plum-size bullet wound above the left eye. “Is this him?” members of the security community asked Bitton. “Is it Sinwar?”
In 2004, Bitton had helped save Sinwar’s life. Fearing that he might be having a stroke, Bitton insisted that he be sent from prison to a hospital for treatment. Surgeons removed a life-threatening abscess from Sinwar’s brain.
In 2011, on the day of his release from prison, Sinwar told Bitton that he would find a way to return the kindness. Back in Gaza, Sinwar swiftly became Hamas’s unquestioned leader; ultimately, he planned the unprecedented and brutal operation that he called Al-Aqsa Flood. As it turned out, one of the victims of October 7th was Bitton’s thirty-eight-year-old nephew, Tamir Adar. A resident of Kibbutz Nir Oz, Adar was among a small group of men on the kibbutz who tried to fight off the Hamas attackers that morning. After Adar was grievously wounded, Hamas fighters scooped him up and brought him back to Gaza. By all accounts, Adar died. His body remains in Gaza.
At his home in Kibbutz Shoval, near Gaza, Bitton keeps a large hostage poster of his nephew. “I’d seen Tamir on Rosh Hashanah, just days before October 7th,” he recalled. “He was happy all the time, an optimist, a wonderful dad with his children, riding around with them on a tractor. A special person.”
When I spoke with Bitton, first on a trip to his home this summer, then by phone this week, he never betrayed any fury or outsized emotion. He told me that when he saw the pictures of Sinwar on his phone at lunch, he experienced only a sense of recognition. “I knew it immediately,” Bitton told me. “It was him.”
More than forty thousand Palestinians have been killed in the past year, many thousands of them civilians. (As I was writing this, a Palestinian friend sent me a photograph of his seven-year-old cousin, who was killed this week in an air strike, along with many other family members, in northern Gaza.) Hundreds of thousands have been displaced; countless buildings, including schools, mosques, and hospitals, have been destroyed. Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli intelligence officer and a leading expert on Hamas, said that Sinwar does not have an obvious successor. “No one person can fill his shoes,” he told me. “The power might well be split between Sinwar’s brother, Mohammed, who could lead the military wing of Hamas in Gaza, and Khalil al-Hayya, one of the political leaders abroad, in Qatar.”
For the moment at least, Hamas leaders and sources close to the leadership circle have tried to project an aura of resilience and an emphasis on the virtues of martyrdom. They are quick to recall many previous Hamas leaders who have been killed by the Israelis over the years, including their founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. “It seems that Israel believes that killing our leaders means the end of our movement and the struggle of the Palestinian people,” Basem Naim, a member of the Hamas politburo, said. “We believe that our destiny is one of two good things, either victory or martyrdom. Yes, it’s very painful and distressing to lose beloved people, especially extraordinary leaders like ours, but what we are sure of is that we are eventually victorious.”
Naim’s is the official word from Hamas. But some reporting and public-opinion polls suggest that although Palestinians are filled with rage toward Israel, there is also a great deal of anger directed at the leaders of Hamas, for triggering on October 7th what they must have known would be a horrific conflagration. Without absolving the Israeli government of the immense human and material costs of the war or the occupation, some Palestinian analysts have apportioned plenty of blame to Hamas for its violence and absolutist ideology. The Palestinian historian Yezid Sayigh, who is the author of “Armed Struggle and the Search for a State,” told an interviewer for the London Review of Books podcast this week that “with the seventh of October Hamas effectively destroyed the idea of negotiation.”
Like some Israelis, Bitton hoped against hope that the death of Sinwar was not merely a military event but, rather, an opportunity to bring home the hostages, end the war, begin an international effort to rebuild Gaza, and begin a diplomatic process to bring some semblance of peace to the Middle East. In this, he echoed statements by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and by many in the Middle East, particularly in Cairo, Riyadh, and the U.A.E.
In a televised statement to the Israeli people on Thursday, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, celebrated the death of Sinwar but was purposefully vague on the question of his intentions and strategy. The conflict was not over, he said.
When he deems it necessary, Netanyahu tends to leak to, or speak through, right-wing journalists, such as Yinon Magal, who hosts “The Patriots,” on Channel 14, a Fox News-like station. Through such avenues, Netanyahu has been putting out the line that he was right all along—that, while members of the security establishment argued for a relative measure of restraint and a deal for the hostages, he was the Churchillian grand strategist uniquely capable of seeing the over-all picture. He was the savior figure, pressing the fight against Hamas, in Gaza; against Hezbollah, in Lebanon; against Iranian militia proxies in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq; and, most crucially, against Iran itself
One Israeli analyst told me that an image of Sinwar’s corpse that appeared on Israeli television and on social media was being touted as Netanyahu’s “iconic victory photograph,” the gruesome equivalent of the indelible picture of young victorious I.D.F. soldiers at the Western Wall, in the Old City of Jerusalem, at the end of the 1967 Six-Day War. More important, the analyst said, was how Netanyahu would use the moment—for a turn toward peace and resolution or toward his narrow political interests. Both President Biden and Vice-President Harris expressed hope that the death of Sinwar would be a turning point and might even temper Netanyahu’s behavior. With Election Day looming, it was not hard to sense their anxiety over their limited ability to control events and the impulses of the Israeli Prime Minister.
Amos Harel, the leading military columnist for Haaretz, and a persistent critic of the Prime Minister, told me that he is deeply concerned that Netanyahu, rather than using the occasion of Sinwar and the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s deaths as leverage to find negotiated settlements with his enemies, could overplay his hand for his own political purposes at tremendous risk to the future of Israel and the Middle East. As Harel put it, “There is too much euphoria here now.” ♦