A HAMAS chief came "back from the dead" to mastermind the October 7 attacks, Israeli spies believe.
Mohammed Sinwar, younger brother of "Gaza's Bin Laden", is said to to have faked his own death in 2014 and ever since been living secretly inside Gaza's network of terror tunnels.
The shadow commander, who specialises in kidnappings and cross-border infiltration, was pronounced dead almost a decade ago after pictures surfaced of him lying in a bloodstained bed.
However, Mohammed – younger brother of Israel's most wanted terrorist and the head of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar – seems to be alive and kicking.
Now, Israel's ruthless Mossad spies appear to be quietly hunting him once again after his picture emerged alongside Yahya's in a security briefing.
IDF troops have reportedly located his lair and seized documents and weapons including maps, drones, mortars and technological devices.
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Sources close to Israeli intelligence claim that he was deeply involved in planning the cross-border killing-spree on Israel that saw 1,200 Jews slaughtered and over 200 hostages dragged back into Gaza.
“He was 100 per cent one of the core team who planned Oct 7,” a former Mossad counter-terror chief told the Telegraph.
“In the military leadership he’s very important,” the spymaster said, adding that he was one of four key players behind the massacres.
“He’s around number seven on the wanted list, alongside the likes of Mohammed Deif, Marwan Issa and Tawfiq Abu Naim.
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"He’s an important figure and he’s still alive for sure.”
Faking Mohammed’s death was part of a specific plot to protect one of Hamas’s three “shadow commanders,” Ronen Solomon, an independent intelligence analyst, told the Telegraph.
He “is considered one of the main brains in planning the invasion, massacre and mass kidnapping of the Israelis from the surrounding settlements."
Solomon has been following the notoriously secretive younger Sinwar for decades as he survived over six assassination attempts – each time heading further underground.
He hasn't been seen in public since 2014, not even to attend his father's funeral last year.
“His speciality is border infiltration and kidnappings for [securing] the release of all prisoners," he explained, referencing the 5,000 Palestinians locked up in Israel.
Mohammed was reportedly the driving force behind springing his older brother from an Israeli jail in a huge prisoner exchange back in 2011.
Earlier this week, Israel claimed to have "Gaza's Bin Laden" surrounded in a bunker as they wiped out a Hamas stronghold.
Israel's defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said Yahya Sinwar was “hiding in his bunker…without contact with his associates”.
He was dubbed "dead man walking" by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu as the IDF troops moved in.
Israel Defence Forces spokesman Lt Col Richard Hecht branded the 61-year-old "the face of evil".
"He is the mastermind behind this, like Bin Laden was [with 9/11]."
The Israelis urged Gazans to kill or hand over the bogeyman themselves as this would “hasten the end to the war”.
The evil Hamas leader was jailed in the late 1980s, for a string of brutal crimes including the abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers.
At the time, Sinwar ran the group's counterintelligence wing known as al-Majd and reportedly made a victim bury his own brother alive.
His ruthless terror tactics earned him the nickname the "butcher of Khan Younis" after Gaza's second city, where he was born.
He was eventually convicted by a secret Israeli military tribunal for the murder of 12 Palestinians and would spend 22 years behind bars.
When Yahya was released, he was not even known to be part of Hamas leadership.
But by 2017, the monstrous man would take over the terror group's brutal rule over Gaza from Ismail Haniyeh, who now lives in exile in Qatar.
Meanwhile, another shadowy Hamas terror chief also lurks beneath the bomb-blitzed streets of Gaza.
Mohammed Deif, the so-called "voice of war", has spent decades underground remaining the ghost that Israel could never kill.
A man of intense infamy, terror and anonymity – he has haunted the Strip as the commander of al-Qassam brigades, Hamas’s military wing.
On the morning of the October 7 attacks, his voice was broadcast across Gaza as he told his militants to "put an end" to Israel's "crimes against our people".
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Like Mohammed Sinwar, the one-eyed, wheel-chair bound maniac has moved through darkness and evaded numerous assassination attempts.
Israel suspects that Yahya Sinwar drew up the plans for the October 7 massacres alongside the shadow commanders of Mohammed Deif and the younger Sinwar.
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