It is unlikely that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip and head of its political bureau, spends much time thinking about the novel he wrote 20 years ago.
Published in 2004, “The Thorn and the Carnation” was smuggled out in sections from Israeli prisons where he was serving four life sentences. The novel reflects a time of personal despair and defiance, a stark contrast to his current role at the helm of Palestinian decision-making during a war that has reshaped the geopolitics of the region.
Yet reading the novel today is nevertheless akin to listening to Sinwar’s voice narrate the background to the ongoing war in Gaza. These are the only words he has written about himself, making this document required reading at a time when Palestinian narratives are obscured, as they relate to this war and beyond. In the same vein, Sinwar’s novel has been glossed over in the extensive Western analysis of Hamas’ top man.
Since Hamas’ military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7, 2023, there has been a flurry of Israeli reports about Sinwar. Both Israeli and U.S. intelligence reports agree he bears direct responsibility for the operation. Curiously, these reports have largely overlooked Mohammed Deif, the commander of the Al-Qassam Brigades, despite his status as the only public face celebrated by supporters of the Palestinian resistance in both the West Bank and Gaza over the past three years.
The obsession with Sinwar intensified on Aug. 6, when Hamas announced his appointment as head of its political bureau, just five days after the assassination of his predecessor, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. Western media scrutiny of his biography has increased, drawing heavily on Israeli intelligence sources, including accounts from Yuval Bitton, a dentist who later became a senior intelligence officer in the Israeli prison service. Prominent Western newspapers carry conflicting portrayals of Sinwar, who turns 62 in late October, that oscillate between demonization and awe, describing him as cunning, shrewd, intelligent, cruel, evil, cold, resilient and capable of random killing.
Widely circulated Israeli testimonies detail his alleged methods of torturing Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel. One such account describes how he purportedly attempted to extract a confession from a suspect’s brother by force-feeding him sand with a spoon. Another claims that he dripped boiling oil on suspects’ heads and executed numerous individuals who confessed to working for Israeli intelligence, either by strangling them with his hands or decapitating them with a machete. Perhaps the most pervasive story is the one in which Sinwar is said to have buried an informant alive.
In a nod to the Israeli narrative, which implies that the decades-long conflict began on Oct. 7, 2023, much of the Western take on the history of Hamas — a resistance movement that was founded in the 1980s — has become conflated with the history of Sinwar himself.
The words of Sinwar in his speeches have been parsed by many Western and Israeli analysts for obscure religious meanings, reflecting a cultural misunderstanding whereby Palestinian and Arab leaders are often seen as inscrutable and alien.
In most of these analyses, Sinwar’s life story, as portrayed in “The Thorn and the Carnation,” is rarely mentioned, although it is the most extensive document available that offers glimpses of his biography within the broader context of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Any attempt to understand Sinwar’s personality is incomplete without an in-depth look at this book, written by his own hand, which provides crucial insights into the environment that shaped him and his generation of Hamas leaders in Gaza across four decades of Israeli occupation.
Sinwar probably started writing fiction to document his experience, especially given the absence of Palestinian political literature or books representing the Palestinian perspective in the various Israeli prisons where he was incarcerated for 22 years.
Born in 1962 in Gaza’s Khan Younis refugee camp, Sinwar has spent his life immersed in political activism and resistance. He joined Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, from its inception in 1987 and eventually took responsibility for Majd, an organization tasked with tracking and eliminating collaborators with Israel. Little is known about his political activities before joining Hamas, aside from his intense involvement as a student activist at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Arabic. Between his student activism and the founding of Majd, which became the nucleus of Hamas’ security apparatus, there is a gap in the record of his life, covering the events that prepared him to assume this critical role in the movement.
Israeli forces arrested Sinwar in 1989, when he was 27, and sentenced him to four life terms for killing four Palestinians accused of collaboration. He was 49 when he was released in a hostage exchange deal for Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier Hamas abducted in an operation led by Sinwar’s brother Mohamed in 2006.
Sinwar began a new chapter in prison, learning Hebrew well enough to translate books into Arabic, despite the long periods of solitary confinement he endured. He then decided to embark on a new challenge: writing his first novel, which he completed after 15 years in prison. With the help of dozens of fellow prisoners who operated like an ant colony, as described in the foreword to his novel, Sinwar successfully smuggled it out of the prison in sections, evading the watchful eyes of the prison wardens.
This accomplishment demonstrated that even the severe security measures and brutality within the prisons could not prevent Palestinian prisoners from finding ways to communicate their messages. It also underscores Sinwar’s central role and influence, both within the Palestinian prisoner community and Hamas, long before he would become a household name in Gaza and the West Bank. The novel was followed by his second book, “Glory,” which explores the operations of Israel’s General Security Service, the Shin Bet, and the assassinations carried out against resistance leaders. “Glory” was published in 2010.
He was released from prison in 2011, to an entirely different Gaza from the one that existed before his incarceration. Hamas now ruled the enclave, leading Israel to impose a tight siege as collective punishment. Sinwar assumed significant roles within the movement before he was elected head of Hamas’ Gaza branch in 2017, succeeding Ismail Haniyeh, the former head of the movement in Gaza who moved to Doha, Qatar.
“The Thorn and the Carnation” follows a Palestinian family living in Gaza’s al-Shati refugee camp after being displaced from their village in 1948. Narrated by Ahmed, the youngest grandson, the novel chronicles the family’s struggles — shaped by the disappearance of their father and uncle — the harsh conditions of the refugee camp, and political events spanning 37 years. The eldest son joins the Fatah movement, while his younger brothers align with the Islamic resistance and the intifada. The novel intertwines personal and historical events, documenting key milestones of Palestinian history from 1967 to the early years of the Second Intifada.
Although it was completed more than two decades ago, Sinwar’s detailed narrative of the life he lived in the strip offers compelling insight into the current conflict in Gaza. The parallels demonstrate that Israel’s ongoing war is merely a violent reiteration of the same mechanisms and policies of occupation that have persisted since the time depicted in the novel. These policies — forced mass displacement, land grabs, massacres and mass arrests — continue to shape Palestinian actions, as they have since 1948.
The difference this time lies in the magnitude of the Palestinian operation on Oct. 7, for which Sinwar, more than anyone else, has been seen as responsible. When he wrote his novel, Hamas lacked the weapons, experience and influence it now wields within the Gaza Strip and across the occupied Palestinian territories. The novel covers a period of political and intellectual transformation occurring in response to changing developments on the ground, and highlights the cumulative interactions across Palestinian generations.
Yet it is also deeply connected to the present. If the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation signals a shift in the Palestinian resistance movement, “The Thorn and the Carnation” reflects the continuity of a broader strategy within Gaza’s resistance. The work ultimately emphasizes that escalation is necessary when other methods have been exhausted, to force a decisive confrontation with the Israeli occupation. This approach is aimed at “changing the equation,” as Sinwar states in the novel.
Sinwar begins his novel with the earliest memories of his protagonist. The 5-year-old Ahmed observes his father digging an underground shelter beneath their home. It is the 1967 war, and hundreds of Palestinian families — Nakba survivors and their descendants — are living in squalid refugee camps with nowhere to run from Israeli bombardment other than makeshift underground trenches. The images evoke Hamas’ vast underground tunnel network, which has expanded over decades of Israeli occupation. They are also a reminder that the use of tunnels in warfare is not a Hamas novelty, with ancient roots and modern parallels in Vietnam and North Korea.
The family huddles in this dark pit in al-Shati for days, following news of the 1967 defeat via a radio placed near the entrance of their hiding place, awaiting a military victory that never comes and hoping for a return to the homes they were displaced from in 1948.
In the introduction to his novel, Sinwar proclaims that it is not the story of a specific person, “even though all its events are true.” At the same time, he exerts little effort to completely distance the story from his own life, and glimpses of it appear; the narrator is the same age as Sinwar and may have sought shelter, like hundreds of other families at the time, in trenches beneath the worn-out floors of their homes in Khan Younis camp during the 1967 war.
Sinwar’s family had settled in Khan Younis after being displaced from al-Majdal, which Israel conquered in 1948 and ultimately renamed Ashkelon, after the nearby ancient port. Little is known about Sinwar’s father, Ibrahim al-Sinwar, who passed away two years ago. He belonged to the same generation as Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was born in the same area and migrated to Gaza at the age of 12, and possibly knew him. Glimpses of Sheikh Yassin’s story are echoed by the narrator of Sinwar’s novel, Ahmed. Like Sheikh Yassin, who lost his father at the age of 3, the narrator becomes an orphan at 5. Both grew up in al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza.
The disappearance of the father and uncle in the novel highlights the emergence of a new generation of Palestinians, whose political consciousness was shaped in the aftermath of the 1967 defeat and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, and to which Sinwar belongs.
Palestinian resistance at the time was politically and geographically distant from Gaza, which woke up one morning in the summer of 1967 to find the Egyptian army camp near al-Shati deserted, before news of the defeat had arrived. Sinwar describes a symbolic scene he may have witnessed himself: the Israeli army, having seized military vehicles and tanks still bearing Egyptian flags, opening fire on the Palestinians running toward them for help.
The withdrawal of the Egyptian army from Gaza in 1967 marked the end of nearly 19 years of Egyptian administration. This period gave Gaza its specific status, which would be set by its eventual transformation into a massive refugee camp for Palestinians displaced from territories occupied after 1948. By 1967, more than half of Gaza’s population — roughly half a million people — were refugees displaced by Israel.
The details of daily life in the camp during that time resonate with many of the harsh realities in Gaza today, often described in international reports as “catastrophic.” The Gaza in which Sinwar grew up is portrayed in the novel as a wasteland: a conservative and isolated refugee community where camp homes resemble “chicken coops” with tiled roofs that barely protect their residents from torrential rain. The diet is meager, consisting mainly of vegetables and what the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) monthly ration cards provide — flour, cooking oil and some legumes. Long queues form in front of the only water tap installed by UNRWA in the camp’s courtyard, where water is available for only a few hours each day. The children have nothing but worn-out clothes distributed by UNRWA twice a year. A favorite game among them is “Arabs and Jews,” where one team plays Palestinians (“Arabs”) and the other Israeli occupation soldiers (“Jews”). Electricity is a luxury, available only in the homes of the relatively “well-off.”
The “new shoes” that Ahmed’s mother buys for him to wear on his first day at the UNRWA school, which bring him great joy, are inevitably used, his school bag made of tattered cloth. The family experiences the “touch and smell” of new clothes only when the eldest son returns from his university studies in Egypt and buys them some for the first time. Yet the narrator describes their financial situation as relatively good compared with other camp residents.
The author’s intent to illustrate the economic disparity between Gaza and other Palestinian territories is clear, particularly in the comparison with the city of Hebron, about 40 miles away. Hebron experienced an economic revival after the occupation, largely due to Jewish religious tourism to the Ibrahimi Mosque. This economic focus influenced Palestinians at the time, diverting attention to production and improving living standards, which in turn hampered Fatah’s efforts to organize resistance in the city. It was not surprising that Palestinians were divided over the viability of resistance, especially after the Arab armies’ swift defeat by Israel. “How could a group of fedayeen [resistance fighters] with their simple weapons and limited capabilities stand against it?” This was a common topic of conversation in the city’s cafes during a period when Palestinian hopes were at their lowest, long before Hebron transformed into a hotbed of resistance led by the generation of children of the 1967 war who, from the 1980s onward, would take up arms against the occupation.
In the early 1970s, Palestinians were able to cross into Israel to work. At the time, there was freedom of movement — no checkpoints, walls or other barriers. Israeli businesses hired Palestinians from the occupied territories — Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem — because they were cheaper and easy to exploit with long hours and no benefits. This practice also aimed to suppress resistance, a strategy that sparked significant controversy among Palestinians. The novel captures the tension of this situation, documenting the complex realities and difficult choices faced by an occupied society. What began as a principled moral and political refusal to work in the territories occupied in 1948 gradually eroded under the crushing weight of the poverty that afflicted most of the strip’s residents.
In a scene that encapsulates this complex situation, Ahmed recounts an incident when resistance fighters attempted to confiscate a work permit from a laborer. The man pleads with them, explaining that his eight children have nothing to eat, and what little the relief agency provides is insufficient, leaving them hungry. The resistance fighters, torn between their national principles and the harsh realities of survival, reject his justification and tear up the permit, their eyes brimming with tears — a poignant reflection of the internal conflict between the desperate need to survive and the imperative to uphold national principles.
Sinwar describes the modest yet transformative economic improvements seen by those who benefited. A neighbor builds a wall around his once-open house, another installs a sturdy door and yet another paves the floor of his home. As for Ahmed’s family, despite their refusal to work in Israel, they manage to afford the cost of placing a large piece of nylon over the tiled roof of their house to prevent rainwater from leaking in during winter. This “amazing” development means that, for the first time in many years, they can sleep without the sound of water splashing.
This same overwhelming joy is mirrored in Ahmed’s excitement when the relief agency issues him a card allowing him to eat once a day at its nutrition center after a doctor confirms he is suffering from malnutrition. The intimate details of the entrenched deprivation described in the novel could have only been experienced firsthand by Sinwar himself. Ahmed’s elation is such that he feels as if his head is “touching the ceiling,” and he quickly begins planning to smuggle a piece of kofta to his cousin Ibrahim, who is closest to his heart, so they can share this rare privilege together.
None of the family’s young people, except the eldest brother, are able to attend college after the clash between the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1970s, which for a period led to the cessation of admission of students from Gaza to Egyptian universities. As a result, it was decided to establish a university within the Gaza Strip for the first time. This initiative turned into a fierce battle for the right to education, a right Israel entirely rejected. With no other options, the students joined this fledgling university project, attending evening classes at the Al-Azhar Religious Institute, without a budget or academic staff. As the number of students grew, and with no alternatives available, university classes were held in tents, since the Israeli authorities prevented the entry of construction materials into the strip and imposed strict restrictions on what could be brought into Gaza — decades before the blockade was established in 2007.
An independent university building was not constructed until many years later. The simple act of attending a university, an epic struggle, transformed it into a symbol of peaceful resistance, a national act that defied the occupation, which, as the narrator says, “fights us in everything, even education.”
The story of the university in Sinwar’s book resonates with events today. On Dec. 8 last year, the Israeli military demolished the entire Islamic University building after bombing it and filming the destruction, leaving not a single stone of the educational institution where Sinwar spent many years as an active student. Most of Hamas’ leaders, including Ismail Haniyeh and Mohammed Deif, graduated from this university. Israel also destroyed most of Gaza’s other universities, including Al-Azhar University.
If we consider “The Thorn and the Carnation” to be Yahya Ibrahim Hassan al-Sinwar’s testimony about everything that transpired from his earliest childhood memories in a hole beneath his home to the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000, then it’s possible he integrated elements of his own story into the novel’s characters, some of whom he even named after himself. While Ahmed serves as the novel’s narrator and protagonist, the true hero of the story is his cousin Ibrahim — a self-made young man who is patient, humble, hardworking and deeply religious. He is the first in his family to join the Islamic movement and embodies the quintessential image of Palestinian resistance as Sinwar envisions it.
In the novel, Ibrahim chooses not to marry because he is wholly devoted to the struggle and fully identifies with the battle for liberation. His intelligence and skills make him adept at tracking informants and deciphering the codes they use to communicate. After many years of patience, he does not hesitate to kill his notorious brother, who has been implicated in helping the Israeli security services. When Ibrahim finally gives in to his family’s insistence and marries, he tells them that he will not abandon his work with the resistance, even if it costs him his life or his freedom, or leads to his children becoming orphans.
From its earliest chapters, the novel repeatedly references Palestinian informants, who were often coerced by the Israelis, especially as such activities intensified in the early 1990s. However, it avoids delving into Sinwar’s own experience with Majd, the Hamas intelligence unit he founded. Like his character Ibrahim, Sinwar married later in life by Gaza’s conservative standards and had a son, Ibrahim, shortly after his release.
The Israeli authorities’ codename for Sinwar is “the Butcher of Khan Younis,” a reference to his role in establishing Majd and his 1988 confession to killing four Palestinians accused of collaborating with the Israeli authorities. Israeli security sources also allege that his brutality extended to other killings and the liquidation of numerous Palestinian informants.
The image has been reinforced recently by the Israeli army’s claim to have found documents in one of the tunnels before its recent withdrawal from Khan Younis that include letters from the former leader of the Al-Qassam Brigades, Mahmoud Shteiwi, to his family. In these letters, Shteiwi accuses Sinwar of torturing him and describes him as a “monster.” Al-Qassam claims it executed Shteiwi in February 2016 after he confessed to unspecified behavioral and moral crimes, while Israeli sources, such as Haaretz, maintain that Shteiwi, who was believed to be gay, was punished for alleged collaboration with the Israeli security services, which led to the 2014 bombing of the home of Al-Qassam’s military commander, Mohammed Deif.
Sinwar adopts a cautious tone when discussing the phenomenon of intelligence agents for Israel, who were widespread in Gaza in the early 1990s. His novel recounts how agents were met with violent responses from various Palestinian factions, including killing, flogging and even public execution. The protagonist describes the continued, uncontrolled violence as a “big mistake,” criticizing the lack of legal solutions that could have provided an appropriate response to the issue of informants “with the least possible degree of killing and avoiding the heinous and repulsive image of it.”
This background underscores the pressure felt by many in Gaza to address this explosive and sensitive issue at the time. On one hand, Israel continued to recruit and trap agents, while on the other, the chaotic and violent reactions of Palestinian factions failed to deter the phenomenon effectively.
According to a report by the B’Tselem human rights organization in Israel, 942 Palestinians accused of working for Israel were killed in 1987 alone, 40% of whom were affiliated with the Israeli Ministry of Defense.
The novel thus shows how it began to seem necessary to establish a fully dedicated security apparatus to handle the rise in agents, using standards developed in the absence of a formal legal framework. This was due to the Gazan judiciary’s connection to the Israeli judicial system after 1967. It was in this context that Sinwar co-founded Majd in 1988, shortly before his arrest.
The discussions among the narrator’s politically divided family members — between those who believe in negotiating with Israel to establish a Palestinian state and those who see such negotiations as futile or even doomed — closely relate to the current debate about the Palestinian gains from the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, after the massive destruction in Gaza.
Ibrahim, Sinwar’s alter ego in the novel, summarizes the issue by stating that the problem with establishing a Palestinian state lies in “the price that the Palestinian people will pay” for it, emphasizing that “there is no alternative to forcing the occupation to withdraw.” He argues that had it not been for the Oslo Accords in 1993, Israeli forces would have withdrawn from Gaza and the West Bank due to pressure from the resistance during the First Intifada, without the need for an agreement that promised Palestinians statehood but ultimately gave it to Israeli settlers.
The novel includes a critique of the negotiation track, which Hamas opposed as futile at the time. Sinwar’s novel represents Oslo as a “strategic goal” that provided Israel with a “ladder” to climb down from the precarious position it found itself in, threatened by the resistance during the First Intifada, which began shortly before Sinwar’s detention. He appears convinced that Israel was prepared to “escape” from the West Bank and Gaza as early as 1993. Sinwar, in the words of the no-nonsense Ibrahim, questions the need for a security agreement with Israel when Hamas could “impose other rules of the game.”
After the Oslo negotiations between Israel and the PLO leader Yasser Arafat reached a dead end, the Second Intifada erupted in September 2000, lasting five years. During this period, the Israeli army killed over 3,000 Palestinians and wounded many more. Peaceful Palestinian demonstrations were met by lethal Israeli live ammunition and escalated into armed rebellion, ultimately leading to a series of “martyrdom operations” (suicide attacks) that targeted the Israeli interior and resulted in the deaths of nearly a thousand Israelis. In response to the intense escalation, the Israeli army resorted to bombing Palestinian areas, destroying tens of thousands of homes, conducting incursions with tanks and helicopters and assassinating dozens within the ranks of the resistance.
The events of the Second Intifada, which Sinwar closely followed from inside Israeli prisons, dominate the final part of his novel and may symbolize the carnations referenced in the title. These events perhaps motivated him to complete the work he had started years before the uprising, documenting the conflict as he perceived it — from the 1967 defeat to the dramatic scenes he imagined in his prison cell, of resistance fighters during the intifada raising the flags of the green, yellow and black factions.
It is difficult to ignore the connection between the events of the novel and recent developments in Gaza, especially after Sinwar took full control of Hamas’ leadership in August. This is evident in the attack that occurred on Aug. 19, when a young Palestinian blew himself up in Tel Aviv, in an operation claimed by the Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements, whose joint statement warned that suicide operations would continue in Israel.
The tactic is a reiteration of the same strategy employed by the Islamic resistance (and groups including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Fatah) during the Second Intifada, which saw over 120 suicide operations in the early 2000s in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Such operations are detailed at length in the novel and defended by Ibrahim for their effectiveness in applying pressure on Israel in retaliation for the killings of Palestinians.
“Days before the Intifada we were referred to as inhabitants,” he says. “Two months later we became ‘Palestinian inhabitants,’ then ‘Palestinians’ — and then they had to sit with the PLO which they considered a terrorist group.”
In one conversation between Ibrahim and a young resistance fighter set against the backdrop of these events, the novel touches on the first time Hamas responded with Qassam missiles against Israel, raising concerns about Israel’s reaction. This passage strongly evokes Sinwar’s voice, which has been unheard since Oct. 7, as he refutes the same questions that have been posed to him and other movement leaders in Gaza over recent months regarding Israel’s power and the toll the Palestinians have paid in this war.
Ibrahim, expressing disapproval, asks, “What more could they [Israelis] do than they have already done?” He adds that those who claim the Palestinian people are exhausted are “a small handful of stakeholders. As for the people, they are ready to sacrifice everything for their pride, dignity, and sanctities.”
There is no doubt that the calculations of Sinwar and the movement’s leaders in Gaza are far more complex than this logic, especially after 11 months of war, which have seen a level of violence and destruction unprecedented in modern Palestinian history: over 40,000 killed, close to 100,000 injured and more than 1.9 million repeatedly displaced by Israel. Yet it remains certain that the recurring idea in his story of “creating a new equation in the conflict” is precisely what we are witnessing today.
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