As head of the Intelligence Division of the Israel Prison Service, Yuval Bitton knew Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar – whose organization murdered Bitton's nephew on Oct. 7 – up close

Please introduce yourself.

I'm the father of three and I give public lectures on Hamas. Two years ago I retired from the Israel Prison Service, where I started out in 1996, as a dentist.

And you finished there as head of the service's Intelligence Division.

I attended a course for intelligence officers and served as such at Ketziot Prison [southwest of Be'er Sheva] and then moved up the ladder until I reached the top of the pyramid.

While preparing for this interview, I found an item from 2005 in which you explained the differences between the teeth of prisoners who are affiliated with Fatah and those who are members of Hamas.

The teeth of Fatah inmates are in poor condition, whereas Hamas prisoners maintain hygiene and purity. Theirs is a religious way of life. Ascetic. With rigid discipline. They pray five times a day, don't touch sweets, don't smoke. There's no such thing as smoking in Hamas. You see a 50-year-old prisoner who is entirely free of any signs of illness. No tooth decay. I'd say, "You're Hamas?" They would say, "Yes, how did you know?" "By the teeth," I replied. A very basic insight. Everything has meaning – it's the same with regard to their way of life, for example. At 9 P.M., there is a total lights-out in the prison's Hamas wings; in the Fatah wings they watch television all night.

At that time you were an inquisitive dentist, with good diagnostic skills. How did you end up as an intelligence officer?

There was an intelligence officer I knew who hung out a lot in the clinic, which is a supposedly safe place for prisoners. They feel free to talk there, because their organizations aren't monitoring or eavesdropping on them. He saw that I was talking to them all the time, and I also talked with him about all kinds of insight that I had about them. He realized that I could be a platform for recruiting sources and suggested that I join the prisons service intelligence division.

You know, when I first started out at the service, thousands of prisoners had already been released as part of the Oslo Accords framework. Who was still incarcerated? Around 800 inmates. There was the really hard-core element of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and another 200 Fatah prisoners with "blood on their hands." When I came to Nafha Prison [in the Negev], as a dentist, the whole Hamas leadership was imprisoned there: [Yahya] Sinwar; his right-hand man Rawhi Mushtaha; Tawfiq Abu Naim, the head of the security branches; Ali al-Amoudi, Hamas' communications director and manager of Sinwar's office. And because I'd worked twice a week at a prison for criminals too, I understood that the behavior I saw at Nafha [among security prisoners] was very unusual.

In what way?

The discipline there was at an insane level. There's a leadership, and they decide everything. There's no such thing as a prisoner who does whatever he pleases.

In the 1990s, there was still no separation in the prisons between Hamas and Fatah members.

Until 2007 the two organizations had a joint leadership, with an orderly distribution of tasks. I would look around and grasp that not only was this "business" being managed like a military organization in every respect – they had simply copied their models from the outside, with the same complex structure involved in electing the leaders, the same positions, only behind bars. There was the head of the Hamas political bureau – in prison. I was fascinated.

A kind of microcosm of the organization in jail. A ship in a bottle. But there are hierarchies and organizations [among inmates] in all detention facilities.

True, but among criminal prisoners, I saw completely different behavior. Back then, there were no crime families with so-called soldiers and an economic infrastructure. There were prominent prisoners, like Herzl Avitan, for example, but there were no gangs per se. The inmates in a security prison are also a different breed. They are not rapists and thieves.

They are people with political ambitions, with an ideological backbone.

The Fatah prisoners of that period were actually the founders of the organization; they had been incarcerated since the 1980s. They were people with a solid ideology. The same goes for the Hamas inmates: They were the ones who established Hamas, which in that period was already the Hamas responsible for suicide attacks.

Hamas, which was no longer the organization that dealt with issues of charity, widows and orphans.

It wasn't the socially oriented organization, as it were, that Israel aspired to cultivate in the 1980s as the entity that would pose a threat to Fatah. It was already a military organization then. The thing with Hamas is that they have always been a faction of the Muslim Brotherhood. They set themselves Islamist goals: to annihilate the State of Israel, to liberate sacred Muslim lands. The Israelis just didn't get it: For them, Hamas and Fatah were the same thing.

I'd like for us to avoid the wisdom of hindsight, if possible. Do you stand behind what you are saying? That you, as a prison dentist, thought that Hamas was a danger to Israel's very existence as much as 30 years ago?

I stand behind that. So, yes, already back then. As a dentist. Fatah talked about the 1967 borders, about the occupation, about the Palestinian people. To me, the Hamas inmates would say, "There's neither 1967 nor 1948. There are no borders and there is nothing to talk about. You are on Waqf land, Muslim sacred ground, and you have no place here." When I became an intelligence officer, I made use of the insight about Hamas and Fatah being from two different worlds. That wasn't understood on the outside until 2007.

After Hamas' terrifying takeover of the Gaza Strip, after the Fatah people saw their people being thrown out of buildings.

Fatah people didn't grasp what was about to happen. From their perspective, Hamas were their brothers in the resistance. They thought they were confronting Israel together; they never imagined that Hamas was capable of massacring their people.

Until Hamas did just that – something we're familiar with.

We [Israelis] were taken by surprise by the horrific disaster of October 7. I'm certain that in Fatah they weren't surprised. They'd already seen it happening – they'd already seen how people were thrown off the roof, without a drop of mercy. How they [Hamas] tied Fatah activists, still alive, to cars and dragged them through the streets until they died. From Hamas' point of view, members of Fatah are not their brothers. So what if they are Muslims too? They are an obstacle on the road to achieving the goal: a sharia state.

After these events, the penny dropped for Fatah. Their leaders in prison came to us [at the prison service] and said, "If you don't get them out of our cells – now – we will slaughter them all." Many inmates, whose families and friends had been massacred, wanted revenge. Fatah grasped that Hamas had a different agenda.

An Islamist agenda.

Islamist – not nationalist. That rift continues to this day. We also saw it in Fatah's behavior in the West Bank. They understood that they would not [be able to] crush Hamas there, that the same things would recur. They understood that their great enemy was Hamas, not Israel. They changed course. I'm telling you that when I spoke with significant Fatah leaders at that time, in prison, they told me, "Hamas will do to you what they did to us. You're cultivating Hamas, injecting money into Gaza, humiliating Fatah, but in the end they will do to you what they did to us."

You spent many hours with Sinwar. Tell me about your relationship with him. When did you first meet him?

We spent many hours indeed. The first encounter was when I was still a dentist. By 2004, when the intelligence picture had become clearer to me, I already saw him differently. I saw his dominance as Hamas' leader in Gaza, and the bitter rivalry between Hamas-West Bank and Hamas-Gaza. Hamas-Gaza is very much influenced by the extremist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt; Hamas-West Bank is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan. The latter live together with King Abdullah and [in the past with] King Hussein. They are more pragmatic.

What form did the differences between them take? How did you see them in real time?

For example, when I tried to help advance the Shalit deal [in 2011, for the return of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was abducted by Hamas to Gaza in 2006, in exchange for 1,026 Palestinian prisoners] from inside the prison. Israel was ready to release only prisoners who had been arrested before the Al-Aqsa intifada – in other words, anyone taken into custody after 2000 was not included in the list of those who would be freed. But how does a Hamasnik from Gaza think, and not just Sinwar, by the way? "No. I want it all." There's no pragmatism. He wants the major Hamas prisoners to be freed – like Abdullah Barghouti, the explosives engineer behind the Sbarro, Café Hillel, Moment and Apropos bombings [restaurants and cafés in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv attacked by terrorists], who received 10 life sentences. Or Abbas al-Sayed, who was responsible for the terrorist attack in the Park Hotel [in Netanya, in 2002, in which 30 people were killed].

Sinwar himself was released in the Shalit deal: He had murdered Palestinians [suspected of collaborating with Israel], not Jews, so he did not technically have "blood on his hands."

That was a decision I could understand at the moral level – but when it came to the level of danger? It was a sign of total ignorance. He is 10 times as dangerous as anyone with "blood on his hands." Sinwar, Tawfiq Abu Naim, Rawhi Mushtaha – they don't have [Israeli] blood on their hands, and they are Hamas' leaders today.

At the time, did you object to Sinwar's release?

Of course.

What did you say, and to whom?

You have to understand: The Shin Bet [security service] didn't even ask the prison service; they didn't include the service. I was on the team of Haggai Hadas [the Shalit deal negotiating team], so I could make my views known there, but there was no discussion in which prison service representatives participated actively in deciding on the names [of those to be released]. I don't understand why. Sinwar had been held in Israel since 1988. Who knew what had happened and was still happening with him until his release, what he was up to? Only the prison service knew.

So, you just sat home and were silent? Didn't you try to raise a ruckus? To approach political decision makers?

I couldn't get to them – they do not engage with prison service personnel. I did what I could where I could, with Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet. I was also a relatively junior figure then. That's what frustrates me most today. I'm certain that if I had been the head of the Intelligence Division then, I simply would not have allowed Sinwar's release to happen. I made my voice heard, but it simply had no effect. MI and the IDF do not monitor prisoners they took into custody 22 years earlier. That's not their job. They deal with what is happening on the ground. The thing is that releasing such prisoners affects the operations of MI and the Shin Bet on the ground.

And they don't know that? They must.

We would like to think that a person who has been away from his turf for 22 years loses his influence. But it's simply not true. That's exactly the point we're missing. They don't disappear in prison. It's not like some criminal inmate who comes out after 20 years and has no one to talk to. It's in the security facilities that those who want to be leaders shape their leadership. In prison they interact with the ranking figures, with those the organization views as people of stature.

Prison as a leadership institute.

Totally. And another critical matter that we, as Israelis, miss, is that from their point of view, those who paid the price of a prison term have added value.

And the longer the term, the higher the value.

Of course. Think of Sinwar, who leaves prison after orchestrating the arrangements for the [Shalit] deal, having established his status as leader, while others in the leadership, [Ismail] Haniyeh and [Mahmoud] al-Zahar, had never seen the inside of a prison. Compared to them he's a hero. By the way, I was also against the release of [Saleh] Al-Arouri [a senior Hamas figure who was freed in 2007 and killed in an IDF drone attack in Lebanon last January]. I argued with the Shin Bet, I told them not to deport him, that he would not sit quietly. That he would send out octopus tentacles everywhere and operate the organization from afar. That is of course what happened and what he did – and with the help of the group he gathered around him in prison, to boot. You really don't have to be especially smart to see this.

What did you see in Arouri?

I saw a person whose authority was heeded by thousands of Hamas prisoners in jail, whose word was law. He had amazing abilities of persuasion. He didn't use force, just his personality. He could make a room go silent simply with a glance. He was so charismatic, far more charismatic than Sinwar.

Sounds like you liked him.

Look…

I'll rephrase. Did his charisma work on you as well?

No. Because I knew very well what lurked behind that charisma. Tenacity of idea. Of purpose. When I concluded my tenure as head of the Intelligence Division, they [the Hamas prisoners] were happy to see me go, they knew that I was a threat to them, simply because I knew them. I'll give you an example. In 2010, Sinwar wanted to get two inmates who had been placed in solitary confinement out. He decided that he would organize a hunger strike of 1,600 prisoners, along with terrorist attacks and he would set the entire West Bank ablaze. I set an ambush for him. I brought in two Hamas leaders from the West Bank – not part of his Gazan group. They told him, "No, for two prisoners we will not launch a war like that with the prison service. Who do you think you are? You don't decide things on your own." I created friction. A confrontation. Head-to-head.

In other words, you actually generated intelligence? Actively, I mean. You created a reality.

Prison intelligence is the only sort of intelligence that is preventive. That is, you are actually also shaping the intelligence picture, because you control them [the prisoners]. You decide where they will be and what they will do. They [Palestinians] are very tribal. For example, Fatah prisoners from Hebron will be loyal to a leader from Hebron. It's the same with Nablus, Ramallah, Tul Karm, etc. And among all these groups, there are also cultural and psychological differences.

Not only between Hamas and Fatah, but within the organizations themselves.

Yes. Hebron prisoners are different from Nablus prisoners. We saw that also when we arranged encounters between them, deliberately. Things exploded. All-out wars broke out between them. Power struggles like that are excellent for us. They help intelligence personnel, because each side wants you with on their side. We got to a situation where Fatah inmates themselves asked to be separated from the Hamas prisoners. I stood aside and was pleased. They lashed out at one another, but stopped attacking the warders. That was good for me. Let them mess with themselves and not with us. That's the power of divide and rule, but to do it, you need to know them in depth. I did the same with the famous hunger strike of Marwan Barghouti.

The so-called Tortit strike [the hunger strike launched by the Fatah leader in 2017, during which he was filmed eating a chocolate snack bar].

You know what he said when he launched that hunger strike? "I'm going to dismantle Bitton's kingdoms now."

What does "Bitton's kingdoms" mean?

The prisoners cooperated with me. When he declared the strike, he had an agreement that everyone would join in: Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Popular Front. I made it very clear to those organizations what would happen if they joined. The Fatah prisoners had to be dismantled from within, so I spoke with their leaders. I told them that for 20 years Barghouti hadn't done a thing for the Palestinian people, and now too all he wanted was to put something over on them, to play at being Nelson Mandela. They also did not join the strike – [those from] Hebron, Nablus, Tul Karm, Jenin. He ended up with 600 prisoners, out of 3,600. He kept up the strike for 42 days, and all that time I worked from the inside, including with inmates who had gone on strike with him. The Tortit story is only one aspect of the mind games there. Why did I give him a Tortit bar, of all things?

Because of the color of its wrapping? Hamas green?

Correct.

Really?

Yes. When he ended the strike silently [in secret], the first time, he ate some sort of cake or bread, and had water. I later told my people to give him chocolate. He pretended to be on a hunger strike, those who were with him were almost dying, and he's eating chocolate. I wanted everyone to see that he was eating chocolate.

'Burning hatred'

Tell me, what did you feel about them? You've described here calmly, how you manipulated them, played with their minds. What were they to you? Did you hate them?

People who engage in hatred are weak. Hatred is not a modus operandi.

And you hated them?

I was afraid of them.

Even when you sat with them, one on one? Was that frightening?

In intelligence, you're supposed to put your emotions aside. But yes, there were prisoners in whose eyes you could truly see burning hatred. In their gaze. I felt that I hated them too. Look, I also saw how the Hamas leaders abused other prisoners. Their faith is so strong that they say, "In the name of the faith, this is what we need to do. It doesn't matter if they have little children or a wife." It's crazy, because why is he in prison in the first place? He was arrested because he did something on their behalf. For the movement.

It's a psychopathic viewpoint. There's no compassion, no feelings, no sentiments. Everyone is an object. A pawn.

Absolutely. There was a high-ranking Hamasnik in prison whom Sinwar suspected of collaboration. When he got out, they hanged that person in the city square and brought his 9-year-old son to watch. Is there anything crueler than that? Sinwar himself, too – after all, we saved him. After he collapsed in prison [he was suffering from a brain tumor], we took him to a hospital right away. Israeli physicians fought for his life. Was there a scrap of gratitude? No such thing.

You were present when he was freed?

Of course.

Do you remember that day?

It was pretty traumatic. All the prisoners who were supposed to be released were brought to Ketziot, and it was decided to have them sign a form in which they'd commit to not returning to terrorism. The junior-ranking prisoners signed – what did they care? But Mushtaha and Sinwar said, "We're not signing, and no one else is signing." From that moment no one signed, but we released them all the same. That amounted to caving in. So from that they understood that they could make Israel fold.

What difference would it have made? Would Sinwar say to himself, "No, that's it. I promised Israel. I'll become an accountant"?

Of course not. But then why give them a document to sign at all? If we're going to release him, you know, even if he doesn't sign. Why give him that power?

What else do you remember from that day? Where were you? What did you talk about?

I was with them, I walked around with them – they were on a high. Ketziot is an open-air facility. That particular wing is surrounded by a wall and there's netting above it but you see the sky. The prisoners who had arrived there to be freed hadn't seen the sky for 20 years. In the prisons they had come from, they'd spend the entire day in their cells, maybe going out for an hour or two. Suddenly they see the horizon. They're happy. Euphoric. "We beat you," they said.

What did you tell them?

I felt a twinge in my heart, because I knew the price was steep. And I said, "We are defeating you, not the opposite. Because we are more ethical than you. We are ready to pay this price for a single soldier. You would not have been willing to pay that price if the situation were reversed. We are willing to do it, because we have values and morality – but don't interpret that as weakness." By the way, I truly believe that.

What happened as they left? Did they sing? Applaud?

They didn't dare. They knew that as along as they were still being held by the Shin Bet, they couldn't do that. Only when they had been driven a distance away, I saw them opening windows and making the victory sign. Look, during all those years they would tell me, "We will be freed," and I would say, "There's no way," in order to suppress their motivation. And yet now they were finally being freed, as they had believed. They think differently from us. When Gilad Shalit was abducted, Israel entered the Gaza Strip, eliminated a few hundred terrorists and destroyed buildings; of course, another few thousand civilians paid the price.

I said to Sinwar, "Tell me, is it worth it for 10,000 innocent people to die, in order to free 100 prisoners?" The reply was, "Even 100,000 is worth it." Their notion of time is different, and the price in blood they are ready to pay in order to achieve their goal is different. Because each person who dies is a shahid [martyr]. It's warfare in the name of God.

Are they themselves willing to die?

Not all of them. For example, I had a conversation with Abbas al-Sayed. I asked, "Why didn't you go on a suicide mission yourself? Why do you send others?" He said, "Everyone has a role. I am in charge."

Do you think Sinwar is willing to die?

He is. Definitely. That's the difference between him and the Hamas leaders who were released in the Shalit deal, and are living decadent lives in Turkey or Qatar. They forgot their people. Sinwar is not like that. He's an ascetic. Since establishing the shock committees in Gaza [the Al-Majad organization, whose aim was to liquidate collaborators and violators of religious law], he hasn't changed. Today he feels like Saladin, because he succeeded in doing what no Arab leader before him did. He sees himself as playing a central role in the realization of the Islamist ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood. He thinks he has entered the annals of history. And he really doesn't care if 200,000 people are killed and not a single house remains complete in Gaza. The main thing is the goal, the greater idea.

A Muslim theocracy under the aegis of Qatari money.

Yes. Qatar is the Muslim Brotherhood. Qatar is the great idea. We effectively allowed Qatar to finance the idea.

Not "we." I didn't transfer suitcases of cash to Hamas, and I assume you didn't either.

Then whoever did the transfer, and whoever thought up the concept of allowing the Qataris to enter Gaza and pay Hamas and prop it up. I can tell you that one of the top figures in the Hamas leadership, whose name I will not mention, told me, "How is that you're letting Qatar underwrite Hamas? Underwrite Gaza? Why don't you go to Egypt or even Turkey or the United Arab Emirates? Qatar, of all countries? You don't have a clue."

Tamir, my sister's son, who was 38, grew up and was educated on [Kibbutz] Nir Oz to love the country. In his heroism, Tamir went out to defend his family, his community and the country. He didn't hesitate. He, and his four comrades in the emergency defense squad, fought alone against hundreds of terrorists, and prevented a far larger disaster. [Tamir's grandmother, Yaffa Adar, was among the hostages released in November.] Whole families in Nir Oz were erased. Slaughtered. Burned. It was a holocaust. To tell you I was surprised by the atrocities? Regrettably, no. I know this enemy. Personally. Sinwar could not surprise me. My only surprise was that the IDF, the security forces and the government of Israel allowed this holocaust to take place on Israeli soil.

Sinwar couldn't surprise you?

I don't think so. I know how he thinks. Look, when the first [hostage release] deal was implemented, I was invited to sit in the TV studios and accompany the broadcast of the release [as a commentator]. I refused to do that, because I didn't want to say on air what I really thought. Sinwar went for the first deal, because he had an interest in it. He was apprehensive of the pressure Qatar was wielding on him, under U.S. pressure – an insane steamroller to get him to release the women and children. The moment that interest was gone, the deal was over.

My sister viewed that deal as a preface to future deals, she was euphoric, she thought it was only the beginning. That she would quickly get her son back. I was sure that it was the first and last deal, that her son would not return. But I couldn't say that. I couldn't look my sister in the eye.

During the period when Tamir was considered a hostage, until you learned that he had been murdered [in January], did you try to exploit your acquaintanceship with people in Hamas? To convey messages?

I didn't try. There's no point. It's impossible to speak to the heart of people like them. I'm certain that Sinwar knows that Tamir was my nephew. One-hundred percent. Well, so what? I have no expectations of him. He owes me nothing. Those responsible for bringing back Tamir and the other hostages are the government of Israel and the person who heads it.