Palestinian leaders who accompanied the head of the political bureau of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), the martyr Yahya Sinwar, in prison, spoke about features of his personality that highlight the human side regarding his relationship with his colleagues, while showing the solidity in his positions with the Israeli occupation.
Abdel Fattah Dawla, a liberated prisoner and spokesman for the Fatah movement who lived with Sinwar for 7 years in prison, said that he loved to cook in his room with the prisoners and prepare food for his colleagues, in addition to his love of joking with them.
He was also ready to give as much of his time as possible to teach any prisoner grammar science (Al-Sanwar studied the Arabic language and graduated from the Islamic University in Gaza).
A state said about him that he forced the occupation government and the Shin Bet to negotiate with him inside the prison regarding the negotiations before the Gilad Shalit deal.
“He believes in partnership and kept his promise to the prisoners.” The companions of the martyr, Yahya Al-Sanwar, during the years of captivity speak#Tel Aviv Tribune_Live | #Gaza pic.twitter.com/zdozXoe0sR
– Tel Aviv Tribune Mubasher (@ajmubasher) October 20, 2024
When he was liberated from captivity in the “Loyalty to the Free” deal, he remained loyal to the constellation of prisoners inside Israeli prisons and worked to liberate them.
In his prison, Sinwar refused to conduct any media or press interviews with Israeli institutions, even though many of his colleagues had agreed to conduct them. When the Israeli Channel 2 insisted on conducting an interview with him, his colleagues approached him and he accepted on the condition that he would hear from them his true convictions, and not what the occupation wanted to hear about accepting appeasement. One day.
A believer in partnership
Another colleague who witnessed Sinwar’s life in prison was Ismat Mansour, the freed prisoner. He said that Sinwar had a prominent presence during his prison period, and had a leadership role at the level of the Hamas movement and at the level of the prisoners’ movement, whom he strongly defended.
He believed in partnership and avoided personal calculations between people of the same nation and different factions, and when disagreements arose, he had no problem with the solution being at the expense of Hamas, for example, according to what Mansour says.
He stressed that he was solid in his positions, an ideological and religious believer who had memorized the Qur’an and many of the Prophet’s hadiths.
Israel arrested Sinwar several times and sentenced him to four life sentences before he was released in a prisoner exchange deal in 2011, with more than a thousand prisoners freed in exchange for the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit as part of what was called the “Loyalty of the Free” deal.