EU adds the political leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip to its list of terrorists. Who is Yahya Sinwar

Brussels – The EU Council decided today (January 16) to add Yahya Sinwar, the political leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, to the EU’s terrorist list. One of the main targets of Israeli bombings, Tel Aviv placed a $400,000 bounty on him on January 9.

From today, funds and other financial assets of the “butcher of Khan Yunis,” as Sinwar is known, will be frozen in EU member states. In parallel, all EU operators will be banned from making funds and economic resources available to him. With the addition of the leader of the organization that governs the Gaza Strip, the list of EU terrorists now totals 15 people and 21 groups and entities.

Yahya Sinwar joined Hamas back in the 1980s. He is over 60 years old, born and raised in a refugee camp in Khan Yunis in the south of the Strip. The Israeli army arrested him in 1988 on charges of killing two IDF soldiers. In the 23 years he spent in prison, Sinwar learned Hebrew, and studied in depth “the way the enemy thinks and acts.”

In 2011, he was freed, along with more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners, in exchange for a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. Returning to Gaza, he was appointed Hamas political chief inside the Strip in 2017. Together with Mohammed Deif, head of the al Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military arm, he is believed to be one of the masterminds of the October 7 terrorist attack. Sinwar and Deif are not the only leaders of the organization: Ismail Haniyeh, believed to be the most important political figure in Hamas, lives in exile in Doha, Qatar, while his deputy, Saleh Arouri, is in Beirut, Lebanon.