Hamas Murders the Nephew of the Israeli Doctor Who Saved Hamas Leader Sinwar’s Life

One Israeli doctor knows Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar well.

“Repaying a debt with blood: Israeli doctor saved Sinwar, nephew killed on Oct. 7,” Jerusalem Post, June 21, 2024:

Dr. Yuval Bitton treated Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in a prison clinic in 2004, saving his life with a brain tumor diagnosis and facilitating an immediate transfer to the hospital.

Nineteen years later, Bitton’s nephew was killed by terrorists on October 7 in an attack orchestrated by the now-Hamas leader, he told CNN.

Bitton was employed as a dentist at Nafha Prison when he met Sinwar, who was serving four life sentences for the abduction and murder of two IDF soldiers.

The terror leader never completed his sentences, having been freed as part of a 2011 prisoner-hostage exchange that saw some 1,000 terrorists released in exchange for Gilad Shalit.

Bitton told CNN he felt he knew the attack was coming and immediately knew who was behind the devastating murders of more than 1,200 people.

“I know the person who planned and conceived and initiated this criminal attack,” Bitton said. “I have known him since 1996 – not only him but the entire Hamas leadership in Gaza – and it was clear to me that this is what they were planning.”…

He understood, from his hundreds of hours of meetings with Bitton, as well as time spent with other imprisoned Hamas leaders, that they were planning a large-scale cross-border attack to murder large numbers of Israelis and to seize hundreds of hostages with whom they would then escape back into Gaza.

Though a dentist, Dr. Bitton was able to diagnose Sinwar’s condition as the aftermath of a stroke, which led to his being taken for surgery, performed that very day, to an Israeli hospital, where an “abscess in the brain” was removed. Had the Israeli doctors not been so alert in their diagnosis and prompt in their removal of the abscess, Sinwar would have died.

“He also told me that on the day he was released in [Gilad] Shalit’s deal in 2011, that he owed me his life, and one day, he will repay it.

Why did Sinwar even bother to make this promise, which he had no intention of ever fulfilling? Might it have been because, however fleetingly, his promise might have made Dr. Bitton feel that he, Sinwar, was not all bad, that he was capable of feeling gratitude and was prepared to demonstrate it sometime in the future. Or was it just a way for Sinwar to toy with the Israeli doctor, pretending to have a semblance of decency, like the SS men who gave Jewish children candy before murdering them?

Despite his promise, Sinwar orchestrated the October 7 attacks, which saw Hamas terrorists infiltrate Israel and brutally murder civilians, foreign nationals, and soldiers….

One of the victims of the attack was Bitton’s nephew Tamir….

Yes, Sinwar’s payback for having his life saved was the murder of his lifesaver’s nephew. But Sinwar might respond that he had no idea that Bitton’s relative was in one of the kibbutzim targeted for attack, for had he known, he would have given orders not to kill Bitton’s nephew, but to take him hostage.

Having spent hundreds of hours in Sinwar’s company, Bitton explained that he understood Sinwar’s mindset and perceptions of the world well. He told CNN that Sinwar believes that Jews have “no place” on “Muslim lands.”…

In those hundreds of hours in Sinwar’s company, Bitton got to know him better than any Israeli. He perceived him as a fanatic and a moral monster, on the level of the Nazis, who had only one goal: to destroy the Jews of Israel whom he believed, as a good Muslim, could have no claim to land that once was part of dar al-Islam and, therefore, must forever so remain. Whatever it took, however many Gazan civilians might die, in the war to destroy Israel, was in Yahya Sinwar’s eyes well worth it. He was, and remains, indifferent to the deaths of Palestinian civilians, and even to the deaths of other members of Hamas. It has always been his life, his rule, his triumph that mattered.

Dr. Bitton could see the stone-cold hatred in Sinwar’s face, and understood there could be no compromise between this man and anyone he perceived as an enemy — not with Fatah, whose men he had had thrown off the roofs of 15-story apartment buildings during the Hamas-Fatah war of 2006, and especially not with the Israelis.

Bitton said that Israel had made a mistake in not establishing an alternative to Hamas rule in Gaza….

How could Israel have established that alternative rule in Gaza? By attacking Hamas in 2005, before the terror group could seize control of the Strip? By supplying Fatah with more and better weaponry, so that it could prevail in its war with Hamas? By transporting Fatah fighters from the West Bank to Gaza, so that they might join the fight against Hamas? All of these might have been possible. But at that time, in 2006, the Israeli government thought that by letting Hamas take over in Gaza and murder its Fatah rivals, the two parts of Arab “Palestine” — Hamas-ruled Gaza and Fatah-ruled West Bank — would be forever sundered, and this would prevent the possible emergence of a unified “Palestinian state.”

Somewhere in the vast maze of tunnels under Gaza, Yahya Sinwar is hiding. The Israelis keep discovering tunnel shafts — more than 200 were unearthed in Rafah — and tunnels. More than 3,000 tunnels and shafts have so far been uncovered, and the IDF has been systematically blowing them up. Sinwar’s movement through the warren of an ever-diminishing number of tunnels has been curtailed. And the IDF soldiers who have gone down into the tunnels, both to explore them, and to destroy them, have begun to close in on Yahya Sinwar. He has Israeli hostages around him as protection, but even these may not save him from being captured or killed. In the end, will he go down fighting, becoming a “martyr” for Palestine, or will he, as I suspect, emerge from the tunnels with his hands up and whimpering, hoping to be spared the fate both he and the Israeli soldiers surrounding him know he deserves? The IDF does not kill in cold blood those who surrender; Yahya Sinwar may yet survive, in an Israeli prison, with no possibility this time of being included in any future hostage-for-prisoner swap.

“Our attitude towards Hamas was arrogant. We dismissed Hamas. And Hamas said everything it intended to do, but we didn’t want to listen.”

Dr. Bitton, alas, is right. The failure to comprehend the signs of an impending attack by Hamas represents the largest failure in the history of Israeli intelligence. Once the war is over, an investigation into that failure, one that spares no one, either in the civilian or the military echelon, must be undertaken.