An Israeli who spent ‘hundreds of hours’ with his country’s most deadly foe assesses his next move
The Palestinian in the clinic at one of Israel’s highest security prisons near Beersheba had a persistent pain in the back of his neck. He trembled and had trouble walking. Yuval Bitton, then a 28-year-old dentist just a year out of medical school, suspected that his patient might be suffering from a C.V.A., an ischemic cerebrovascular accident, resulting from a life-threatening brain tumor. “He needs to be hospitalized, immediately,” Bitton advised the prison doctors.
Dr. Bitton’s diagnosis was quickly confirmed at the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba. The surgery took hours. The prisoner survived. When he returned to the prison, he thanked Bitton and the rest of the prison medical staff for having saved his life—in excellent Hebrew.
The year was 2004. The patient was Yahya Sinwar, the Palestinian who in 2017 would become the leader of Hamas in Gaza and subsequently the mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel in which 1,200 mostly Israeli civilians died and 240 were taken hostage.
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Judith Miller is a contributing editor of City Journal and adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow her on Twitter here.
Photo by Ali Jadallah/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images