Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, during a rally in Gaza City.

 Hamas leader Yehia Sinwar has for years overseen a secret police force in the Gaza Strip that conducted surveillance on everyday Palestinians and built files on young people, journalists and those who questioned the government, according to intelligence officials and a trove of internal documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The unit, known as the General Security Service, relied on a network of Gaza informants, some of whom reported their own neighbors to police. People landed in security files for attending protests or publicly criticizing Hamas. In some cases, the records suggest that authorities followed people to determine if they were carrying on romantic relationships outside marriage.

Hamas has long run an oppressive system of governance in Gaza, and many Palestinians there know that security officials watch them closely. But a 62-slide presentation on the activities of the General Security Service, delivered only weeks before the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, reveals the degree to which the largely unknown unit penetrated the lives of Palestinians.

The documents show that Hamas leaders, despite claiming to represent the people of Gaza, would not tolerate even a whiff of dissent. Security officials trailed journalists and people they suspected of immoral behavior. Agents got criticism removed from social media and discussed ways to defame political adversaries. Political protests were viewed as threats to be undermined.

Everyday residents of Gaza were stuck — behind the wall of Israel’s crippling blockade and under the thumb and constant watch of a security force. That dilemma continues today, with the added threat of Israeli ground troops and airstrikes.

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“We’re facing bombardment by the occupation and thuggery by the local authorities,” Ehab Fasfous, a journalist in Gaza who appeared in the files of the General Security Service, said in a phone interview from Gaza.

Fasfous, 51, is labeled in one report as among “the major haters of the Hamas movement.”

The documents were provided to the Times by officials in Israel’s military intelligence directorate, who said they had been seized in raids in Gaza.

Reporters then interviewed people who were named in the files. Those people recounted key events, confirmed biographical information and, in Fasfous’s case, described interactions with authorities that aligned with the secret files. The documents reviewed by the Times include seven intelligence files ranging from October 2016 to August 2023. The military intelligence directorate said it was aware of files containing information on at least 10,000 Palestinians in Gaza.

The General Security Service is formally part of the Hamas political party but functions like part of the government. One Palestinian individual familiar with the inner workings of Hamas, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, confirmed that the service was one of three powerful internal security bodies in Gaza. The others were Military Intelligence, which typically focuses on Israel, and the Internal Security Service, an arm of the Interior Ministry.

Basem Naim, a spokesperson for Hamas, said the people responsible for the General Security Service were unreachable during the war.

With monthly expenses of $120,000 before the war with Israel, the unit comprised 856 people, records show. Of those, more than 160 were paid to spread Hamas propaganda and launch online attacks against opponents at home and abroad. The status of the unit today is unknown because Israel has dealt a significant blow to Hamas’ military and governing abilities.

Israeli intelligence authorities believe Sinwar directly oversaw the General Security Service, according to three Israeli intelligence officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. They said the slideshow was prepared for Sinwar personally, though they did not say how they knew that.

The presentation said the General Security Service works to protect Hamas’ people, property and information, and to support its leadership’s decision-making.

Some slides focused on the personal security of Hamas leaders. Others discussed ways to stamp out protests, including the “We Want to Live” demonstrations last year that criticized power shortages and the cost of living. Security officials also tracked operatives from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an ideologically aligned militant group that often partners with Hamas.

Some tactics, like amplifying Hamas’ own message, appeared to be routine politicking. In other instances, officials suggested using intelligence to undermine opponents and distort their reputations, though the files were vague about how that was to be done.

“Undertaking a number of offensive and defensive media campaigns to confuse and influence adversaries by using private and exclusive information,” the document read.

Security officers stopped Fasfous on his way to a protest in August, seized his phone and ordered him to leave, a report says. Fasfous confirmed that two plainclothes officers had approached him. Authorities searched his recent calls, and wrote that he was communicating with “suspicious people” in Israel.

“We advise that closing in on him is necessary because he’s a negative person who is full of hatred, and only brings forth the Strip’s shortcomings,” the document said.

The most frustrating thing, Fasfous said, was that the officers used his phone to send flirtatious messages to a colleague. “They wanted to pin a moral violation on me,” he said.

The report does not include that detail but does describe ways to “deal with” Fasfous. “Defame him,” the report said.

“If you’re not with them, you become an atheist, an infidel and a sinner,” Fasfous said. He acknowledged supporting protests and criticizing Hamas online, but said the people he was in touch with in Israel were Palestinians who owned food and clothing companies. He said he helped run their social media accounts.

The General Security Service’s goals are similar to those of security services in countries such as Syria that have used secret units to quell dissent. The files of the General Security Service, though, mention tactics like censorship, intimidation and surveillance rather than physical violence.

“This General Security Service is just like the Stasi of East Germany,” said Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli military intelligence officer specializing in Palestinian affairs. “You always have an eye on the street.”

Palestinians in Gaza live in fear and hesitate to express dissent, analysts said.

“There are a lot of people practicing self-censorship,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a professor of political science from Gaza City. “They just don’t want problems with the Hamas government.”

That view clashes with the most strident comments of Israel’s leaders, like President Isaac Herzog, who blamed Palestinians in Gaza for not toppling Hamas before the Oct. 7 attacks.

“There’s an entire nation that is responsible,” he said. “This rhetoric about civilians were not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up.”

The General Security Service, the files show, also tried to enforce a conservative social order.

In December 2017, for example, authorities investigated a tip that a woman was acting immorally with a man who owned a clothing shop. A security report noted that she visited the shop for an hour on one day, then more than two hours the next. The report presented no evidence of wrongdoing, but proposed that “relevant parties” address the matter.

An October 2016 report described young men and women performing unspecified “immoral acts” at a Palestine Liberation Organization office in Khan Younis at night. Hamas sees the Palestine Liberation Organization as a compromised entity, whose leader too often favors Israeli interests. The report offered no evidence of misdeeds but recommended summoning a man who claimed to be in possession of videos and pictures.

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The files also show that Hamas was suspicious of foreign organizations and journalists.

When Monique van Hoogstraten, a Dutch reporter, visited a protest encampment along the border with Israel in April 2018, authorities noted the most banal of details. They noted the make and model of her car and her license plate number. They said she took pictures of children and tried to interview an elderly woman. Van Hoogstraten confirmed the reporting trip in an interview with the Times.

The file recommended further “reconnaissance” on journalists.

None of the files reviewed by the Times were dated after the start of the war. But Fasfous said the government remained interested in him.

Early in the war, he said he took images of security forces hitting people who fought over spots in line outside a bakery. Authorities confiscated his camera.

Fasfous complained to a government official in Khan Younis, who told him to stop reporting and “destabilizing the internal front,” Fasfous recalled.

“I told him I was reporting on the truth and that the truth won’t hurt him, but that fell on deaf ears,” he said. “We can’t have a life here as long as these criminals remain in control.”

Sinwar Helped Start the War in the Gaza Strip. Now He’s Key to Its Endgame.

After Hamas attacked Israel in October, igniting the war in the Gaza Strip, Israeli leaders described the group’s most senior official in the territory, Yehia Sinwar, as a “dead man walking.” Considering him an architect of the raid, Israel has portrayed Sinwar’s assassination as a major goal of its devastating counterattack.

Seven months later, Sinwar’s survival is emblematic of the failures of Israel’s war, which has ravaged much of Gaza but left Hamas’ top leadership largely intact and failed to free most of the captives taken during the October attack.

Even as Israeli officials seek his killing, they have been forced to negotiate with him, albeit indirectly, to free the remaining hostages. Sinwar has emerged not only as a strong-willed commander but as a shrewd negotiator who has staved off an Israeli battlefield victory while engaging Israeli envoys at the negotiating table, according to officials from Hamas, Israel and the United States. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence assessments of Sinwar and diplomatic negotiations.

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While the talks are mediated in Egypt and Qatar, it is Sinwar — believed to be hiding in a tunnel network beneath Gaza — whose consent is required by Hamas’ negotiators before they agree to any concessions, according to some of those officials.

Hamas officials insist that Sinwar does not have the final say in the group’s decisions. But although Sinwar does not technically have authority over the entire Hamas movement, his leadership role in Gaza and his forceful personality have given him outsize importance in how Hamas operates, according to allies and foes alike.

“There’s no decision that can be made without consulting Sinwar,” said Salah al-Din al-Awawdeh, a Hamas member and political analyst who befriended Sinwar while they were both jailed in Israel during the 1990s and 2000s. “Sinwar isn’t an ordinary leader, he’s a powerful person and an architect of events. He’s not some sort of manager or director, he’s a leader,” al-Awawdeh added.

Sinwar has rarely been heard from since the start of the war, unlike Hamas officials based outside Gaza, including Ismail Haniyeh, the movement’s most senior civilian official. Although he is nominally junior to Haniyeh, Sinwar has been central to Hamas’ behind-the-scenes decision to hold out for a permanent cease-fire, U.S. and Israeli officials say.

Waiting for Sinwar’s approval has often slowed the negotiations, according to officials and analysts. Israeli strikes have damaged much of Gaza’s communications infrastructure, and it has sometimes taken a day to get a message to Sinwar and a day to receive a response, according to U.S. officials and Hamas members.

For Israeli and Western officials, Sinwar has over the course of these negotiations, which stalled again in Cairo this past week, emerged as both a brutal adversary and a deft political operator, capable of analyzing Israeli society and appearing to adapt his policies accordingly.

As an architect of the Oct. 7 attacks, Sinwar masterminded a strategy that he knew would provoke a ferocious Israeli response. But in Hamas’ calculus, the deaths of many Palestinian civilians — who do not have access to Hamas’ subterranean tunnels — were the necessary cost of upending the status quo with Israel.

U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies have spent months assessing Sinwar’s motivations, according to people briefed on the intelligence. Analysts in both the United States and Israel believe that Sinwar is primarily motivated by a desire to take revenge on Israel and weaken it. The well-being of the Palestinian people or the establishment of a Palestinian state, the intelligence analysts say, appears to be secondary.

An Understanding of Israeli Society

Sinwar was born in Gaza in 1962 to a family that had fled its home, along with several hundred thousand other Palestinian Arabs who fled or were forced to flee during the wars surrounding the creation of the state of Israel.

Sinwar joined Hamas in the 1980s. He was later imprisoned for murdering Palestinians whom he accused of apostasy or collaborating with Israel, according to Israeli court records from 1989. Sinwar spent more than two decades in Israeli detention before being released in 2011, along with more than 1,000 other Palestinians, in exchange for one Israeli soldier captured by Hamas. Six years later, Sinwar was elected leader of Hamas in Gaza.

While in prison, Sinwar learned Hebrew and developed an understanding of Israeli culture and society, according to fellow former inmates and Israeli officials who monitored him in prison. Sinwar now appears to be using that knowledge to sow divisions in Israeli society and heighten pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, according to Israeli and U.S. officials.

They believe that Sinwar has timed the release of videos of some Israeli hostages in order to spur public outrage at Netanyahu during crucial phases of the cease-fire talks.

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Some Israelis want the remaining hostages released even if it means agreeing to Hamas’ demands for a permanent truce that would keep the group — and Sinwar — in power. But Netanyahu has been reluctant to agree to end the war, partly because of pressure from some of his right-wing allies, who have threatened to resign if the war concludes with Hamas unbroken.

If Netanyahu has been accused of dragging out the fighting for personal benefit, so, too, has his archenemy, Sinwar.

Israeli and U.S. intelligence officers say that Sinwar’s strategy is to keep the war going for as long as it takes to shred Israel’s international reputation and to damage its relationship with its primary ally, the United States. As Israel faced intense pressure to avoid launching an operation in Rafah, Hamas fired rockets last Sunday from Rafah toward a nearby border crossing, killing four Israeli soldiers.

If this was a gambit by Hamas, it appeared to pay off: Israel began an operation this past week on the fringes of Rafah, and against that backdrop President Joe Biden made his strongest criticism of Israeli policy since the war began. Biden said he would halt some future arms shipments if the Israeli military began a full-scale invasion of the city’s urban core.

U.S. officials say Sinwar is most likely in the tunnels under Khan Younis, the next major city to the north — intelligence that could undercut the Israeli rationale for the military operations in Rafah.

Projecting an Image of Unity

Hamas and its allies deny that either Sinwar or the movement is trying to leverage further Palestinian suffering.

“Hamas’ strategy is to stop the war right now,” said Ahmed Yousef, a Hamas veteran based in Rafah. “To stop the genocide and the killing of the Palestinian people.”

U.S. officials say that Sinwar has shown disdain for his colleagues outside Gaza, who were not informed about the precise plans for Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7. U.S. officials also believe that Sinwar approves military operations conducted by Hamas, although Israeli intelligence officers say they are unsure of the extent of his involvement.

A senior Western official familiar with the cease-fire negotiations believes that Sinwar appears to make decisions in concert with his brother, Muhammad, a senior Hamas military leader, and that throughout the war he had sometimes disagreed with Hamas leaders outside Gaza. While the outside leadership has at times been more willing to compromise, Sinwar is less ready to concede ground to the Israeli negotiators, in part, because he knows that he is likely to be killed whether or not the war ends, the official said.

Even if negotiators seal a cease-fire deal, Israel is likely to pursue Sinwar for the rest of his life, the official said.

Hamas members have projected an image of unity, downplaying Sinwar’s personal role in decision-making and maintaining that Hamas’ elected leadership collectively determines the movement’s trajectory.

Some say that if Sinwar has played a bigger role during this war, it is mostly because of his position: As the leader of Hamas in Gaza, Sinwar has greater say, although not the final call, according to Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas official based in Qatar.

“Sinwar’s opinion is very important because he’s on the ground and he’s leading the movement on the inside,” said Abu Marzouk, the first leader of Hamas’ political office in the 1990s.

But Haniyeh has the “final say” on key decisions, Abu Marzouk said, adding that all of Hamas’ political leaders were of “one opinion.” Haniyeh could not immediately be reached for comment.

Still, there is something unusual about Sinwar’s force of personality, according to al-Awawdeh, his friend from prison. Other leaders might not have instigated the Oct. 7 attack, preferring to focus on technocratic matters of governance, al-Awawdeh said.

“If someone else had been in his position, things might have gone in a calmer way,” he said.

Sinwar could not be reached for comment and has rarely been heard from since October. U.S. and Israeli officials have said Sinwar is hiding near hostages, using them as human shields. An Israeli hostage who was released during a truce in November said she met Sinwar during her captivity.

In February, the Israeli military published a video that it said soldiers had taken from a security camera they found in a Hamas tunnel beneath Gaza. The video showed a man hurrying down the tunnel, accompanied by a woman and children.

The military said the man was Sinwar, fleeing with his family.

The claim was impossible to verify: The man’s face was turned away from the camera.

White House says Palestinians ‘living in hell’ but says no genocide in Gaza

The White House on Monday condemned the conditions in which Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live after seven months of Israel’s war against Hamas. But a spokesperson stopped short of saying the high civilian death rate amounts to a genocide.

In what were the Biden administration’s strongest remarks on the humanitarian situation in Gaza since the start of the war after the October 7 terror attacks, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said the US still “wants to see Hamas defeated” and hopes “justice” will be delivered to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. He also said “there can be no equivocation... the Palestinian civilians caught in the middle of this war are in hell” during a press briefing.

“The depth and trauma they've endured are unimaginable. Their pain and suffering are immense. No civilian should have to go through that,” he said, adding that the conditions in Gaza and the suffering of the Palestinian people “are on the president’s mind every day”.

Mr Sullivan also stated that Israel faces “an unusual, even unprecedented burden” in conducting their war on Hamas because of the militant group’s use of “hospitals and schools and other civilian facilities for military purposes” and the “vast network of tunnels” under Gaza that put “innocent civilians in the crossfire” because of their location in civilian areas.

But he cautioned that those conditions don’t “lessen Israel's responsibility to do all it can to protect innocent civilians” and said Israeli forces “can and must do more” to ensure “the protection and wellbeing of innocent civilians”.

Mr Sullivan continued by denying the view that the civilian death toll in Gaza amounts to a genocide against Palestinians, telling reporters: “We do not believe what is happening in Gaza is a genocide. We have been firmly on record rejecting that proposition.”

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He added that the US would “continue to lead international efforts to surge humanitarian assistance throughout the Gaza Strip, because innocent civilians should never go without food, water, medicine, shelter, sanitation, or other basic necessities”.

The comments from President Biden’s top national security aide come days after Mr Biden said he would withhold offensive arms to Israel if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government went ahead with a full-scale assault on Rafah. Millions took shelter in the city in southern Gaza after months of Israeli bombing in the north.

Mr Netanyahu, who needs to remain in office to avoid trial and possibly prison if found guilty of corruption charges, has vowed to press on with the Israeli operation in Rafah over American objections.

Asked whether the embattled Israeli leader’s defiance of Mr Biden shows the US now lacks clout with its longtime ally, Mr Sullivan said Israel’s government is its own and Mr Netanyahu has to answer to his own constituents.

“The prime minister doesn’t have to answer to us. He’s got to answer to the Israeli people,” he said.