The Will to Resist: Sinwar and the Agency Dilemma in Gaza

An image few can forget: a man with a severed arm raises the other, hurling the stick in his hand. Above him, a violent machine, a military drone, is filming his last moments. The image from the machine confirms his location to Israeli snipers who will soon end his life. Yahya Sinwar was neither pleading nor afraid — he was present, defiant, unwavering.  

This visceral scene lays bare the central question of his life and arguably of our age: What is meaningful agency under conditions designed to annihilate it? In a world of systemic violence and constrained choice, action can feel impossible, both individually and collectively. Sinwar, the martyred leader of Hamas and al-Qassam Brigades, stands at the heart of this dilemma, defying classic understandings of agency.

Scholars tend to approach agency from one of two dominant perspectives: structuralism or post-structuralism; the former is rooted in sociology and political science, the latter largely shaped by feminist and postcolonial theory. The first suggests that an agent is primarily the product of conditions and context, that of constrained autonomy, uneven capacity, and historically inherited structures. The second insists that meaningful agency must be tied to a political overhaul or systemic transformation, as if anything short of that collapses into mere reaction. 

Both of these, however, are conceived from the so-called metropole: (neo)liberal societies that rarely contend with the conditions of the postcolonial subject — conditions that are not only limiting but work to eliminate any possibility of agency itself. 

Sinwar, a product of these conditions, does not easily fit into these two dominant schools of thought. 

In many ways, he fits into the category of the “historical protagonist,” as articulated by Anna Krylova. This is a figure who appears to bend history through force of will, strategic focus, and presence. This figure, Krylova claims, does not necessarily recognize these actions as revolutionary or dissenting. Sinwar also embodies what William Sewell describes as the “skill” of agency, which is the capacity to master and displace the very frameworks that organize power, called “schemas,” that sought to erase him. In this same vein, we can draw parallels to Saba Mahmood’s idea of agency as not only resistance, but an ethical commitment to a collective tradition, like Islam, whereby adherence to it is not submission but a conscious and generative act. 

Sinwar’s agency operated across three overlapping layers, each corresponding to different scales of power: Krylova’s “agency as formation,” the kind of agency that gets forged within a structure over time; Sewell’s “agency as skill,” the capacity to “transpose,” redirect, and repurpose the very rules of a system; and what I call and describe below as “agency as world-making,” taking Mahmood’s theorizing as a launchpad. 

Yet he also strains and exceeds these conceptualizations. To understand him is to refuse monolithic definitions of agency, as he himself encapsulates how theories can never fully explain the realities of agency.

The “historical protagonist” appears to bend history through force of will, strategic focus, and presence.

He was not the “unknowing” actor of Krylova’s framework but a conscious strategist who transformed his own formation into a weapon to resist colonial rule in the ongoing Palestinian revolution. Sewell’s framework falters at the colonial limit. Its assumption that schemas and skills operate across comparable contexts collapses when the agent is persona non grata, illegitimate within the colonial system. Mahmood offers a vital understanding of an ethical inhabitation of a collective tradition in her work, Islam specifically, but stops short of a revolutionary agency that does not only subvert an existing imperial order but seeks to dismantle it entirely. 

Sinwar exceeds all three, as his biography below demonstrates. It is only through the convergence of these layers that the full scope of Sinwar’s agency becomes legible. 

His context was sharply different from that of other resistance figures and fighters in that he was a leader in the resistance movement; yet in another sense, it was almost identical: produced by the same carceral regime, siege conditions, and colonial domination that continue to shape political subjectivities and material realities in Palestine.

Agency as Formation

In the “Agency Dilemma” debate, Anna Krylova argues that agency is not a universal capacity to “choose,” but a result of how deeply a specific history inhabits a person. Sinwar is the ultimate historical protagonist, a subject whose identity is the coherent, internal result of any given system’s contradictions. 

Born in 1962 in the Khan Younis refugee camp, Sinwar was a child of the ongoing Nakba, raised in the immediate shadow of the 1956 Khan Yunis massacre. During the Suez Crisis, according to historian Yazid Sayigh, Israeli occupation forces swept through Khan Yunis on November 3, summarily executing dozens of fida'iyyin fighters and killing 275 Palestinian civilians. 

This collective memory of mass executions defined the Palestinian memory of his generation — Sinwar’s agency was not a “choice” to use violence, but his refusal of the inherited posture of the victim. 

After 1967, this structure of violence became a bureaucratic cage. Life in Gaza, and much of Palestine, was governed by over 1,000 military orders, regulating everything from planting lemon trees (Order 1015) to organizing book clubs (Order 101). 

In order for the settler-colony in Gaza (at the time) to remain under tight colonial control, a vast network of informants were required to perpetuate it. It is within this informant culture that Sinwar’s agency took a decisive turn. The creation of the al-Majd (internal) security arm of Hamas during the First Intifada was a response to a society being compromised by surveillance. To remove the informant was to restore the possibility of a unified Palestinian sovereignty; categorical action became his response to the system installed by the occupation, one that continuously jeopardized Palestinian unity through bribes, coercion, blackmail, and betrayal.

Sinwar’s agency was not a “choice” to use violence, but his refusal of the inherited posture of the victim.

Sinwar was arrested by the occupation forces in 1988 and sentenced to four life terms plus 30 years in 1989 for his role in the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers and his admitted execution of twelve Palestinian collaborators, while leading the al-Majd security wing. When the entity arrested a 26-year-old Sinwar, they didn’t just pull a man from the streets, they moved the historical protagonist into the “belly of the beast.”

Sinwar’s 22 years in Israeli prisons were a critical site of formation for the politically astute leader he would become. The prison system consolidated his subjectivity and understanding of the oppressive mechanisms at play.

In prison, Sinwar did more than study his enemy; he internalized the power relations of an occupation that was ethnically cleansing his people and had been for decades.

Rather than long for liberal “freedom,” he embodied the will of the incarcerated — a will for freedom from erasure. He did not center individual freedom, release, and reintegration into an oppressed existence, but rather the collective survival and political existence of a people the occupation sought to erase. His desire wasn’t personal; it was existential and it was Palestinian.

He was a “historical protagonist” because he lived the logic of the prison to its fullest extent. Rather than surrender to incarceration in a colonial context designed to break political subjectivity and produce compliance, confessions and informants, he used the institution against itself. He did so by treating it as a site of study, organization, and formation rather than punishment and surrender. He remained disciplined, vigilant, and refused the occupier’s imposed moral authority.

In prison, Sinwar internalized the power relations of an occupation that was ethnically cleansing his people and had been for decades. Rather than long for liberal “freedom,” he embodied the will of the incarcerated — a will for freedom from erasure.

While incarcerated, Sinwar taught himself Hebrew, paid close attention to his jailer’s media, and translated Zionist publications in order to map the logic of the adversary. The 1992 hunger strikes, led in part by Sinwar, saw up to 10,000 prisoners subsisting on salt and water. Captives across the prison complex of the entity, these men sustained their strike for two weeks, as civil unrest throughout historic Palestine backed their protest. Through necroresistance, where the body itself becomes the front line, they forced the occupation to put an end to solitary confinement, forced kneeling, and other humiliation rituals; they secured family visits, basic medical care, and, as importantly, access to pen and paper to document the Palestinian story. The prisoners’ strike became a reckoning for a nuclear-armed settler state with the disciplined will of imprisoned men with nothing left to lose.

His formation continued in 2004, after he survived a brain tumor, undergoing treatment provided by the same colonial regime that had sought to erase him. He used his recovery time to write al-Shawk w al-Qurunful (The Thistle and the Clove). In the foreword, he insisted that although all incidents were true, he was not writing his personal story; instead, the novel was documenting a collective experience under siege, imprisonment, and settler‑colonialism.

Inside the cells, his agency was defined by a practical solidarity. He became a primary negotiator for the inmates, bridging ideological divides through everyday acts, like making knafeh and sharing meals with members of secular and rival factions like the PFLP and Fatah. He insisted on a unified Palestinian front, one that the prison was designed to fragment.

While incarcerated, Sinwar taught himself Hebrew, paid close attention to his jailer’s media, and translated Zionist publications in order to map the logic of the adversary.

Sinwar’s release in the 2011 Shalit exchange was not a return to civilian life. The six years following his release solidified his formation. During this time, he acted as a bridge between the movement’s political arm and its military faction, ensuring that his understanding of the enemy’s vulnerabilities was translated materially into the military infrastructure of Gaza.

The 2008 and 2014 wars served as a critical stress test; it was here that the structural contradictions of the siege were truly exposed. In 2008, aerial bombardment proved insufficient against a resistance network that was operating underground. By 2014, tunnel warfare had emerged as Hamas’ most formidable asymmetric weapon, most visibly in the Battle of Shujaiyya, where tunnel networks enabled infiltration operations behind enemy lines, something that a technologically superior force did not anticipate.

Sinwar saw that the “bureaucratic cage” of the post-1967 era had evolved into a high-tech killing machine that could only be countered by equally sophisticated, asymmetrical warfare tactics. By the time he was elected as the leader of Gaza in 2017, the historical protagonist’s formation was complete. He was no longer a subject of the colonial system but an “agent” who was using his refined understanding of his oppressor to manipulate the settler-colonial status quo. 

Agency as Skill

Sinwar’s agency between 2017 and 2023 can be analyzed in the terms of a high-stakes tactical compliance. Following Sewell’s framework, agency is the skill to transpose existing resources and schemas. Sinwar adopted the language of “international diplomacy” and “economic stability” as a means to manage the adversary’s expectations. “A new war is in no one’s interest,” he stated in a 2018 interview, invoking a vision of Gaza as a future Singapore. He, therefore, strategically utilized the neoliberal schema, which assumes that a revolutionary movement can be pacified through financial rewards and administrative importance.

By performing the role of a “rational governor,” Sinwar created the time and space to rebuild military infrastructure, while managing a complex, dual-use economy. Under the logic of “humanitarian management,” the same funding, concrete, and fuel that was granted for reconstruction became the very raw materials for an underground sovereignty. This was a novel redefinition of resources; he maintained that civilian reconstruction and military preparation were inseparable components of a single project of national survival. 

While the world saw Qatari aid and work permits as tools for pacification, Sinwar used them to build an underground city: a network of reinforced tunnels over 500 km long, complete with electricity, ventilation, phone lines, and living quarters. The tunnels created the illusion of a routine governance above while the resistance was developing its military capabilities underground, evading the occupier and his surveillance apparatus.

By performing the role of a “rational governor,” Sinwar created the time and space to rebuild military infrastructure. The same funding, concrete, and fuel that was granted for reconstruction became the very raw materials for an underground sovereignty.

It can be argued that this application of skill extended to his hostage strategy. 

Following the 2011 Shalit exchange deal, where a single Zionist soldier was released for 1,027 Palestinians, two things became apparent. First, the entity would make huge concessions for the release of their own; second, hostages were a “resource” that could be exploited in the occupation’s value system to free Palestinians from the carceral system. 

Sinwar understood that in a so-called state where forging the settler as a “citizen-soldier” is a pillar of national identity, a single captive can significantly impact the security cabinet. His mastery of Hebrew and decades spent consuming Israeli media allowed him to identify this structural vulnerability and turn the occupation’s social fabric into political leverage.

In May 2021, the battle of Sayf al-Quds (Sword of Jerusalem) demonstrated Sinwar’s rejection of a colonial schema that sought to isolate Gaza from the broader Palestinian struggle. By linking Gaza’s military capabilities with the defense of Sheikh Jarrah and al-Aqsa, Sinwar effectively collapsed the artificial barriers between the fragmented territories. His agency became a tool toward reunification; he used the leverage of the armed resistance to force al-Quds back into the center of the political map, proving that his skill was never merely about the survival of a localized administration, but about the liberation of a singular, national body.

Sinwar’s mastery of Hebrew and decades spent consuming Israeli media allowed him to identify a structural vulnerability and turn the occupation’s social fabric into political leverage.

Sewell’s definition of agency as the skillful use of rules captures an essential part of Sinwar’s story, but it is only part of it. If agency remains trapped within the existing rules of the system, it inevitably collapses into mere management, and continues to reinforce the status quo. Sinwar’s evolution suggests that he viewed this maneuver as a temporary necessity in order to preserve the dignity and possibility of the larger goal. 

Agency as World-Making

The final layer of Yahya Sinwar’s agency is perhaps the most difficult to quantify as it is both existential and abstract — agency as political imagination and the construction of new narratives. I build this layer from Mahmood’s theorizing, agency as the complete embodiment of a moral or collective framework, and expand it to its most radical possibility: life and death as world-making. 

This extended theory does not only understand Sinwar as a subject but rather as proof that world-making agency cannot be theorized in advance, only lived.

This form of agency, unlike the first two, exemplifies the Gramscian insistence on the optimism of the will as the refusal to let the pessimism of the intellect determine the limits of what can be imagined, endured, or claimed as dignity under conditions designed to extinguish it. Formation and skill explain how an agent of history becomes and maneuvers, but neither accounts for the will to act toward a reality that has no material guarantee.

World-making agency cannot be theorized in advance, only lived.

In “Politics of Piety,” Saba Mahmood challenges the liberal assumption that agency exists only in resisting norms, in this context Islam and patriarchy. She argues instead that agency can also emerge through the very embodiment of a moral or religious framework. For Sinwar, this was not in the form of religion as a private ritual, though faith was central to his life, but rather religion as the inhabitation of a political will.

October 7 marked the collapse of all three layers of agency into a singularity. It was Sinwar’s, the historical protagonist whose formation turned him into its architect; Gaza’s, whose accumulated skill made it the front; and Palestine’s, the horizon of liberation that world-making makes possible.

Al-Aqsa Flood reflects agency as formation through a return to violence on behalf of a people forced into camps, siege, and the slow pedagogy of erasure. It came in the wake of a long colonial process that hollowed Palestinian life and attempted to render it politically unintelligible through decades of punitive military orders and dispossession, the occupier’s campaign to produce a people who would eventually stop demanding to exist. As such, October 7 is the only logical outcome to these conditions.

Sinwar believed in human capacity so completely that he embodied it without reservation, and in doing so reminded us that we all carry that same possibility.

The Operation was also an agentic maneuver, the culmination of tunnels, weapons, and a wider military infrastructure that Sinwar and the resistance in Gaza had built under the cover of diplomatic performance. The limited means were converted into an arsenal developed under the guise of a governable, contained, and subservient Gaza. This skill strengthened asymmetrical warfare capabilities against a nuclear-armed entity that mistakes technological superiority for permanence.

And it also incarnates agency as world-making, a break with the fiction that Gaza and Palestine could be indefinitely oppressed and neutralized without consequence. By world-making, I mean forcing a new political reality into existence, one that the status quo could no longer deny. The enshrinement of the right to resist occupation in international law is not about moral justification. It is the acknowledgment that the material reality of sustained domination does not extinguish political life. Resistance itself reorganizes that life into forms that the dominant power cannot control, a new reality.

In his final phase, Sinwar’s agency was no longer primarily tactical. It became existential. He remained on the frontlines, engaged in battle. In this context, armed resistance is not external to the proposed framework of agency — for it is the material expression and embodiment of a collective will determined to forge a new reality.

Sinwar did not succumb to “defeat.” Instead, he understood that martyrdom — a death chosen under brutal injustice — can reorganize power, for death is an enduring political force.

In a political landscape structured by distance, where leaders govern from the proverbial ivory tower, he did not leave Gaza, did not govern from the tunnels, and did not ask others to endure what he would not endure himself. He was not only resisting an enemy; he was resisting a political form of disappearance, where leadership survives by removing itself from the scene of violence.

His refusal to hide, therefore, was itself a form of agency, one that cannot be reduced to formation, maneuver, or world-making. This refusal to disappear is the absolute proof that agency cannot be contained by the frameworks built to study it. It can never be wholly defined by theorists, but only by those who risk everything through conscious choice. He was not special because he was exceptional. He was special because he believed in human capacity so completely that he embodied it without reservation, and in doing so reminded us that we all carry that same possibility. 

Sinwar was never naïve about the asymmetry of power; he understood the technological and military imbalance structuring the battlefield. Yet, he operated on the premise that slow death under occupation was itself a form of annihilation. His agency lay in acting on that very premise and refusing to let structural pessimism exhaust the horizon of dignity. Even under conditions designed to eradicate possibility, the will to resist always retains the power to force the occupation’s underlying violence into view.

The drone footage of Sinwar’s final moments, released by the Israelis to mock him, instead solidified his importance and impact on the Palestinian right to resist in global political memory and popular struggle. His agency in and even after death reminds us that the martyr never dies.

Sinwar shattered the regional security architecture that maintains our people’s oppression through normalization, the Abraham Accords, and the US-backed regional order premised on Palestinian containment. He also shattered the moral architecture that feeds that system. Whether intended or otherwise, he exposed the fiction of proportionate military response, the selective application of international law, and the fantasy of Israeli exceptionalism. 

His actions rejected the idea that a nuclear-armed occupying power can dispossess, besiege, and kill in perpetuity without consequence. 

The very naming of al-Wahm al-Mutabaddid (the Dissipation of Illusion), a 2006 Palestinian resistance operation in Gaza, together with a similar rhetoric articulated during the al-Aqsa Flood, offers a tangible expression of this rejection.

“The era of selling illusions to the world — the myth of the invincible army, the invulnerable Merkava, and the alleged military and intelligence superiority — has ended. We shattered it in front of the world, in the ‘Gaza envelope’ and all of Palestine,” said the late Abu Obeida in a televised speech on October 28, 2023.

Resistance is consequence. 

The drone footage of his final moments condenses theories of agency and exceeds them in a single scene. In that moment, his body became a site of meaning, tethering personal agency to a wider narrative field in which physical defeat does not end political presence. 

Death is the foreclosure of theory. 

The scene shows us the precise moment where no framework can fully contain what it means to choose death consciously, freely, and without retreat. The footage, released by the Israelis to mock him, instead solidified his importance and impact on the Palestinian right to resist in global political memory and popular struggle. His agency in and even after death reminds us that the martyr never dies.

In militant and anti-colonial traditions, the willingness to die is not merely an individual gesture but part of a collective political narrative, as in the Battle of Karbala (61 AH., 680 AD). 

For Sinwar, religion was not a private ritual, though faith was central to his life. It was the inhabitation of a political will.

The self-sacrifice and martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali entered the political memory of resistance movements. Sinwar echoed this memory and reportedly stated, “We have to move forward on the same path we started or let it be a new Karbala.” 

Sinwar did not succumb to “defeat.” Instead, he understood that martyrdom — a death chosen under brutal injustice — can reorganize power, for death is an enduring political force. This end becomes another site where individual action and historical formation converge. He appears exceptional in intensity, but not outside the logics that make such acts intelligible and politically resonant.

What is most unsettling is that even this chosen act of martyrdom is not, in essence, exceptional. Sinwar was produced by the same carceral regimes and colonial architectures that shape millions across generations: the refugee camp as the first site of formation, the prison of the entity as the second, and Gaza as the permanent condition in which all these factors converge. What marks him as singular is not the origin of these conditions, but his capacity and skill to study the enemy and manage the asymmetry of power through political strategy, while increasing military capabilities. 

His legacy offers no closure, yet it crystallizes that power does not only corrupt — sometimes it coheres, hardens, and radicalizes commitment when forged through sustained confrontation with injustice. His agency was also resolutely Palestinian, to remain loyal to one’s formation and treat liberation as worthy of self-sacrifice. 

It is the stone against the tank… and the stick against the drone.

—Sari Shraiyteh contributed to preliminary discussions and background research into Sinwar and the framework of agency.