Yahya Sinwar hasn’t been seen in public since the war started last fall. Ahmed Deeb for WSJ
The Crude System of Coded Messages Keeping Hamas’s Leader Alive
Yahya Sinwar’s use of low-tech communications has vexed Israel’s efforts to kill him
Hamas’s top leader Yahya Sinwar could well be dead today if not for a low-tech communications system honed in prison that shields him from Israel’s intelligence-gathering dragnet.
Sinwar has largely shunned phone calls, text messages and other electronic communications that Israel can track and that have led to the demise of other militants. Instead, he is using a complex system of couriers, codes and handwritten notes that allows him to direct Hamas’s operations even while hiding in underground tunnels, according to Arab cease-fire mediators.
The communication method has vexed an Israeli military intent on finding the architect of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people and sparked the war in Gaza. Killing or capturing Sinwar would mark a substantial victory for Israel that could bring the 11-month war closer to an end, but even with military control of the Gaza Strip, Israeli intelligence has come up empty.
Sinwar hasn’t been seen in public since the war started last fall. Israeli officials have said they believe he is in hiding in Gaza.
A glimpse into how Sinwar stays alive comes from Arab mediators who have ferried messages back and forth during cease-fire talks between Hamas and Israel, which don’t talk directly to each other.
A typical message from Sinwar will now be handwritten and first passed to a trusted Hamas member who moves it along a chain of couriers, some of whom might be civilians, the mediators said. The messages are often coded, with different codes for different recipients, circumstances and times, building on a system that Sinwar and other inmates had developed while in Israeli prisons.
The note might then reach an Arab mediator who has entered Gaza or another Hamas operative who uses a phone or other method to send it to the U.S.-designated terrorist group’s members abroad, the mediators said.
Sinwar’s communications methods have become more guarded and complex as Israel has managed to find and kill his high-ranking compatriots, in particular the Beirut attack that killed Saleh al-Arouri, Hamas’s deputy political leader and a founder of the group’s military wing.
“I’m quite sure this is one of the prominent reasons that the IDF didn’t find him,” said Michael Milshtein, a former head of Palestinian affairs for Israeli military intelligence, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. “He really keeps all his basic personal patterns of behavior very strict.”
The Israeli military declined to comment. Hamas declined to answer questions about how Sinwar communicates.
Israel’s military intelligence has some of the world’s most sophisticated abilities to intercept electronic communications, often called signals intelligence. It was after Arouri’s death that Sinwar almost entirely shifted to handwritten notes and oral communication, sometimes circulating voice recordings via a small circle of aides, according to Arab mediators.
Arouri’s death was followed by a number of other killings of top officials in Hamas and Hezbollah, heightening the sense of vulnerability. In July, Israel launched a massive airstrike that it has said killed Hamas’s top military leader, Mohammed Deif. That month, Israel also purportedly killed Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader at the time, in Tehran and launched a strike on a Beirut residential building that took out Fuad Shukr, a core Hezbollah leader who had eluded the U.S. for decades. The Hezbollah commander was directed to an apartment after receiving a phone call that was likely from someone who had breached Hezbollah’s internal communications network, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
“They know if they use any electronic devices, it will be spotted,” said Azmi Keshawi, a researcher at International Crisis Group who lived in Gaza. So Sinwar has reverted to Hamas’s old ways, he said.
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Sinwar’s rudimentary approach to communications harks back to a system that Hamas used in its early years and that the Hamas leader took up when he was detained in 1988 and later imprisoned in an Israeli jail, according to experts on the group.
Before being incarcerated, Sinwar founded Hamas’s internal security police, called Majd, which hunted down suspected collaborators and was active in Israeli prisons. Majd recruited agents inside prison called “sawa’ed” who distributed encoded messages from one section to another, according to the book Son of Hamas by a former Hamas operative-turned-Israeli spy.
The sawa’ed, a nickname derived from the Arabic word for forearms, would wrap handwritten letters in white bread, roll them into balls, then let them dry and harden, according to the book. Like baseball players, the agents pitched the balls from one section of the prison to the next, shouting “mail from the freedom fighters!”
Israel estimates that Sinwar spent years planning for a major war with Israel, including building a vast tunnel network. Milshtein, the former Israeli military intelligence official, said his preparations likely included setting up a communications system that would get around modern intelligence gathering.
The methods are so effective that his pursuers can’t rule out that he isn’t in Gaza.
Access to Sinwar is now more important than ever. While he has long been Hamas’s driving force, the group relied on officials outside Gaza in places such as Qatar to represent its interests. That changed after the assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran—an attack attributed to Israel—led the group to formally anoint Sinwar as the boss.
The changeover came just as the U.S. stepped up its efforts to secure a cease-fire in Gaza in hopes of de-escalating regional tensions. The negotiations are complex, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu raising a number of demands on controversial points that will be difficult to resolve. U.S. officials are skeptical that Sinwar himself wants to end the fighting, either.
Sinwar’s cautious approach has at times slowed negotiations to end the war, which has now caused the deaths of more than 41,000 Palestinians, according to Palestinian health officials, who don’t say how many were combatants. Hamas-led fighters took about 250 people hostage in the Oct. 7 attacks that sparked the war, with 97 still remaining in Gaza, many of them believed dead.
At crucial points in cease-fire negotiations, Sinwar has become unreachable. Other times, he’s relayed messages in near real time. Whether communication delays are a negotiating tactic or a reflection of Sinwar’s strict protocols is unclear.
Sinwar has managed to communicate quickly when necessary. “We extend to you and your esteemed family our heartfelt condolences and blessings for your sacred sacrifice,” he wrote in a letter to Haniyeh in April after three of his sons were killed by an Israeli airstrike.
That letter, according to Arab officials, made it to Haniyeh via couriers just hours after the deaths.
In June, top U.S. officials including Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns flew to the Middle East to push Israel and Hamas toward a cease-fire. Burns held talks with the Qatari prime minister and Egypt’s intelligence chief in Doha, who then met with Haniyeh to force Hamas officials into a deal with the threat of sanctions and arrest.
During that meeting, Sinwar relayed messages in real time, and Hamas refused to agree to a halt in fighting unless Israel made a written commitment to a permanent cease-fire, according Arab mediators. It isn’t clear how Sinwar was transmitting his orders.
Israel has known for at least a decade that Hamas created a landline phone system in its subterranean tunnels. A failed Israeli commando operation in 2018 that sparked exchanges of fire between Israel and Hamas for a few days was an attempt by the Israeli military to tap Hamas’s phone network, according to a later public statement by Hamas. The Israeli military declined to comment on the operation.
At the start of the current war, mediators were seeking to broker a hostage deal between Israel and Hamas that would head off an Israeli military invasion of the Gaza Strip and sent couriers inside Gaza to meet members of Hamas’s armed wing and pass on coded messages.
Sinwar also organized phone calls with mediators on Hamas’s landline network in the tunnels, using codes to determine the day and time as well as aliases in messages setting up the calls, mediators said. Sinwar at times used the names of people who were with him in prison to disguise his true identity, mediators said.
As careful as he has been, the Hamas leader only has to make one mistake to give Israel a window of opportunity, said Thomas Withington, an expert on electronic warfare and an associate research fellow at London’s Royal United Services Institute think tank.
“That split second where you forget discipline,” Withington said, “that can sign your death warrant.”
Write to Summer Said at summer.said@wsj.com and Rory Jones at Rory.Jones@wsj.com