KHAN YUNIS, Gaza Strip — He was only one of the 477 Palestinian prisoners released by Israel in exchange for a single captive Israeli soldier. But as the welcoming celebrations wound down after the swap, many men came to a refugee camp here to pay him their highest respects.
The former prisoner, Yehya Sinwar, 49, is the most senior of the Hamas members freed into Gaza in the deal, and he came home to a world he could not possibly have imagined during his long incarceration. As a young guerrilla fighter, he had collected knives and guns. But as he was driven from the Egyptian border to Gaza City on Tuesday, he saw thousands of Hamas fighters lining the highway, carrying automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades and driving pickup trucks mounted with heavy machine guns.
It was a far greater display of lethal military force, more akin to Libya than Gaza, than what passed for Hamas’s arsenal when Mr. Sinwar co-founded the Islamist organization’s security branch nearly a quarter-century ago. His job, which included punishing “morality” offenders and killing collaborators with Israel, earned him four life sentences in Israeli prison for attempted murder and causing grievous bodily harm through sabotage.
Mr. Sinwar’s status as a prison leader was apparent within hours of his release on Tuesday; he was invited to give a speech on behalf of the prisoners from a specially built stage in Gaza City. A large poster there depicted fighters of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, blowing up tanks and carrying away Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who was released in the prisoner exchange, who was captured during a 2006 raid.
In his speech, Mr. Sinwar highlighted the lengthy period that many of the prisoners had been away, telling the crowd, “We left you one day bleeding under the flames of the occupation in the early years of the first intifada.”
In his case that was early 1988, when Hamas was only one month old.
The question is whether he and his fellow prisoners, many of them military-wing hard-liners, will now argue for Hamas to pursue the course of intifada and bombs, or choose a new direction for a new era.
Sitting in a welcoming tent in his hometown of Khan Yunis, Mr. Sinwar was guarded about what role he would have in Hamas outside prison, saying only: “It is early. I was away for about a quarter of a century and went out with the world around me changed. I need to relax and take my breath and know the situation around me, and after that I will decide.”
He said that like many he had concluded from the Shalit affair that the capture of Israeli soldiers was, after years of failed negotiations, the proven tactic for freeing Palestinians incarcerated by Israel.
“The issue of prisoners can only be resolved in this way,” he said between breaks in receiving well-wishers. “For the prisoner, capturing an Israeli soldier is the best news in the universe, because he knows that a glimmer of hope has been opened for him.”
He said his time in jail was spent studying his enemy and, in the latter stages, taking part in the negotiations for the prisoner exchange.
“They wanted the prison to be a grave for us. A mill to grind our will, determination and bodies,” he said. “But, thank God, with our belief in our cause we turned the prison into sanctuaries of worship and to academies for study. We studied about them a lot. I studied the history of the Jewish people, and you can say I am a specialist in the Jewish people’s history, more than many of them.”
Elsewhere in Gaza City on Wednesday, Hamas was beginning the process of reintegration for the other Gaza returnees, and prisoners expelled from the West Bank and Jerusalem.
At the beachside Commodore Hotel, Hamas functionaries handed out $2,000 to each of the assembled former prisoners, and a Nokia X3 cellphone, to the evident confusion of many of the long-term inmates who had to be shown how to use it.
Among the weary faces some expressed regret for the actions that led them to prison, one saying that he realized the loss he had caused to the family of an Israeli soldier whom he stabbed to death a decade ago. But others were defiant.
“I’m very proud of what I did, and I do not show any regret,” said Shuaib Abu Snini, 44, a Hamas prisoner from Jerusalem who had served 13 years of a life sentence for his role in attacks.
He said he saw no difference between Israeli soldiers and civilians because many Israelis serve in the military. “The one who does something wrong can be sorry. This is legitimate resistance,” he said.
Some may indeed have been further radicalized by their time in prison.
In northern Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp, Wafa al-Bass, who tried to smuggle an explosive vest into Israel in 2005, nominally belongs to President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement, which favors negotiations.
A picture of former President Yasir Arafat adorns the room in her house, where, on Wednesday night, she was greeting women who had come to salute her while men sat in a tent erected in the street.
Nevertheless, she scorned the notion of diplomacy to free more prisoners, saying that the Shalit exchange showed that this was the only effective approach.
“The negotiations that the Palestinian Authority conducted failed,” she said. “From this point, I expect that kidnapping soldiers to swap them for security prisoners is the best way to clear the prisons.”
She showed no remorse for her own actions. “Why should I be sorry as long as there is occupation on my land?” she said. “I will fight to the last breath.”
It remains unclear, however, how much of the immediate post-release sentiment is bravado, or rhetoric intended for public consumption. Now 26, she said she wanted to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca and attend a university. She plans to study psychology.
