Yahya Sinwar, the world’s most wanted terrorist, spent years languishing in Israeli jails before rising to the top of Hamas and plotting the Oct 7 massacre.

He was born in 1962 in the Khan Younis refugee camp and led an impoverished childhood, relying on aid from the United Nations.

After a spell at the Islamic University of Gaza for Arabic studies, he embraced militancy against Israel, though his career as a budding warrior nearly ended at the age of 26 – when he accidentally set off a bomb that he was making.

He soon ended up in an Israeli prison, in the southern city of Ashkelon near the Gaza border, where Israeli interrogators found that he was behind the killing of four Palestinians who had been working as informants for Israel. They dubbed him the “Butcher of Khan Younis”, a name that followed him for the rest of his life.