The crude system of coded messages keeping Hamas’s leader alive

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. 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.