The former jailer of Hamas's masterminds unveils a portrait of evil
Outside Assaf Harofeh Medical Center in the Tel Aviv suburb of Beer Yaakov, two armed guards are escorting a handcuffed prisoner into the building. One of the highest profile security prisoners in the country, the man whose tough countenance is generally a study in cruelty now looks frightened and miserable. If you’d see him, you might even feel sorry for him — he has a fast-growing brain tumor and is about to undergo complex, life-saving surgery.
His name is Yahya Sinwar. The State of Israel is sponsoring his surgery. And he will eventually become the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and mastermind behind the unfathomably barbaric October 7 massacre on Israel’s southern communities.
“ATsome point, Yahya Sinwar, one of the most notorious security prisoners under my purview, began complaining about intense headaches,” recalls Lieutenant (retired) Betty Lahat, former prisons director and head of the Israel Prison Service’s Intelligence Department, a position that put her in charge of top security prisoners, among them Sinwar and other arch-terrorists such as Salah Shehade, Saleh al-Arouri, and Marwan Barghouti, to name a few. “For all of his usual bluster and terror cheerleading, he was absolutely terrified about his own health. It got so bad that we had him transferred to a facility with better medical care, where they discovered that he had an aggressive brain tumor.”
Sinwar’s tumor was found 15 years ago, but Lahat, 68, who retired from the Prisons Services in 2010 and today lives in the Samarian town of Alfei Menashe, still remembers every detail of Israel’s battle to save the arch-murderer’s life. “When they told him the news, he completely broke down. He feared that it was over,” she tells Mishpacha. “And he was right to be scared. His cancer was aggressive and close to his brainstem.”
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