Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was killed on October 16, 2024, but he left behind him a novel, The Thorn and the Carnation, written in 2004 in Bersheeba Prison, in which he outlined his vision for “Palestine”.
“On Saturday at eleven in the morning, numerous buses stop at Palestine Square in Gaza City, disgorging hundreds of Jews, both men and women. They begin to stroll around the city and its markets in groups, swaying, laughing, buying whatever they fancy, eating and drinking … Khalil loiters with a folded Al-Quds newspaper in his hand … he looks at the shop windows and, gradually moving forward, finds one of those Jews a meter away on his right … Suddenly, the newspaper falls from his hand, and a sharp kitchen knife appears in his grip. His hand, holding the knife, swiftly strikes the Jew’s neck, back and forth in a flash, cutting the throat and causing blood to pour out profusely as the man collapses to the ground”.
This revolting scene was not written in a crime novel, introducing a psychotic killer. The author, the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, thinks of Khalil as a hero. Sinwar wrote the novel while he was in prison, after the “Second Intifada” in the early 2000s. It is the story of Ahmad—who is something like Sinwar himself, his brothers Mahmoud, a supporter of the nationalist Fatah movement, and Hassan, who is with the Islamist Hamas, and his cousins, Ibrahim, who emerges as a Hamas leader, and Hassan who becomes an informer. A great deal of the action is this: Jews being killed by grimly determined young men.
This revolting scene was not written in a crime novel, introducing a psychotic killer. The author, the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar thinks of Khalil as a hero.
A few examples:
“A young man, not yet twenty … took his knife hidden among his food and boarded the bus as usual when he went to work in Jerusalem … found a man, pulled out his knife, and stabbed him several times, leaving him for dead. He proceeded and found a female soldier in her uniform; he stabbed her multiple times and she fell dead”.
Another soldier tries to stop Amer, “who threw himself forward and stabbed the soldier once, twice, thrice, leaving him for dead despite his weapon, and Amer was arrested with his head held high” [italics added].
“Two young men in their early twenties … heading for work inside” Israel “reached the gate of the workshop where one of them worked, waited for the owner and the other workers, one of them came, opened the gate, and they entered after him, pulled out their knives and started stabbing him. The second worker came, and they killed him, then the workshop owner arrived, and they killed him … not before one of them wrote on the interior wall using spray paint in memory of the launch of Hamas”.
“A young man agrees with one of his cousins, who steals cars from Jews, to bring him a large and heavy vehicle". In Tel Aviv, “ a large number of soldiers are waiting at a bus stop specifically for military personnel. He accelerates the truck to its maximum speed and then swerves into the station, killing three soldiers and injuring dozens”.
“The young men climbed into a white Peugeot 504, one armed with a Karl Gustav rifle … two others carried commando knives and the fourth drove the car as they sped toward Shuja’iya, pushing past to the factory entrance. … The three leaped out, the one with the rifle commanding the Arab workers to step aside and not to interfere, shouting at them to comply as they reluctantly obeyed. The other two attacked the Jewish owners with their knives; their cries and pleas for mercy rose sharply”.
“Ibrahim received new information about a Jew who came to collect vegetables from the agricultural areas north of Gaza City … and set out to intercept him … One of the young men approached him calling out, ‘Kohen!’ As he turned, responding with a weak ‘Yes?’ in Arabic, three bullets penetrated his head, killing him instantly”.
“The mujahideen targeted a new objective. An Israeli bus returning workers from the Rafah customs crossing on the Egyptian border was passing by when they opened fire on it”.
“'This occupier … must pay the heaviest price possible’, demands Yahya Ayyash: ‘They must understand that we are capable of striking at their core’. He goes on, ‘We must deliver blows beneath the belt, to the abdomen and the face, and not just to the fortified and armoured limbs'”.
These murders are motivated by Jew-hatred, which runs through the book like the lettering in a stick of rock-candy. “I saw a Jew walking along the street of Hebron, which annoyed me”, says Abdel Rahman, “so I picked up a stone from the ground and threw it at the Jew”. The young men visit the Ibrahim Mosque, where their teacher tells them that Salah al-Din’s pulpit “was burned by the sinful Jewish hands in 1968”—though they see no irony in honouring the tombs of “Ibrahim, Isaac, Sarah and Joseph”— all Jews. When Iraq fired rockets into Israel in the war of 1991-2, Sinwar was excited to see them “being hit deep inside its territory, and all of them were running into shelters like terrified rats”.
