Crude System of Codes, Couriers Keeping Hamas Chief Alive
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 tunnels, according to Arab ceasefire mediators.
The communication method has vexed an Israeli military intent on finding the architect of the October 7 attack on Israel that killed 1200 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. 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 during ceasefire talks between Hamas and Israel.
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 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 US-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 Defence Forces. “He really keeps all his basic personal patterns of behaviour very strict.”
Israel’s military intelligence has some of the world’s most sophisticated abilities to intercept electronic communications. 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 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 Hezbollah leader who had eluded the US 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.
“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.
Sinwar’s approach to communications harks back to a system 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. Before being incarcerated, Sinwar founded Hamas’s internal security police, called Majd, which hunted down suspected collaborators.
Majd recruited agents inside prison called “sawa’ed” who distributed coded messages from one section to another, according to the book Son of Hamas by a former Hamas operative-turned-Israeli spy.
The sawa’ed 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!”
As careful as he has been, Sinwar only has to make one mistake to give Israel a window of opportunity, said Thomas Withington of London’s Royal United Services Institute think tank. “That split second where you forget discipline,” Mr Withington said, “that can sign your death warrant.”
Article link: https://todayspaper.theaustralian.com.au/infinity/article_popover_share.aspx?guid=d373cb3d-2fde-4f7a-b369-28c5373a3792&share=trueArticle source: The Australian / Wall Street Journal| Summer Said & Rory Jones | 18 September 2024
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