Within days of the 7 October attacks last year, Israeli investigators had identified Yahya Sinwar, then the military leader of Hamas in Gaza, as the mastermind. To their increasing astonishment, they learned that not only had Sinwar conceived of what he called Operation al-Aqsa Flood but he had planned and organised the assault almost alone.
Only a handful of close aides had been let in on the plans, some with only days to go before the attack, in which about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed and 250 abducted, and which triggered an Israeli offensive that has so far killed 42,500 people, also mostly civilians, and left swaths of Gaza in ruins.
