In 2004, Yuval Bitton headed the dental clinic at Beersheba prison. It was he who ordered the hospitalization of Yahya Sinouar, who was having a stroke.
He saved Yahya Sinouar’s life 20 years ago. On October 7, his nephew died in the attack sponsored by the Hamas leader in Gaza. Yuval Bitton was a dentist, then an intelligence agent in Jewish state prisons, until his retirement two years ago. He told - about his special relationship with the man who is now public enemy number 1 in Israel.
Yuval Bitton was 37 years old at the time. For a little less than ten years, he had headed the dental clinic at the Beersheba prison center. At the beginning of 2004, inmate number 733-333-5 presented himself at the infirmary. This is Yahya Sinouar, the future number one of Hamas. That day, he seemed disoriented and complained of neck pain: “I made the diagnosis. It was a stroke. It was me who decided to have him rushed to the hospital. An abscess was pressing on his brain. They drained it.”
“When he came back, he wrote a letter to the Hamas leadership and he told them that I had saved him and that he was grateful to me”poursuit Yuval Bitton.
Photo taken during a discussion between Yahya Sinouar and Yuval Bitton in the 2000s
Before specifying, not without irony: “He somehow repaid his debt on October 7, when Hamas attacked and my nephew was kidnapped and murdered,” cuts a bitter Yuval Bitton, showing the photo of Tamir, who died at the age of 38, during the battle for the Nir Oz kibbutz.
A discussion in the form of a warning
The hardest part for the former dentist is that he is convinced that the massacre could have been avoided: “In 2004, Sinouar told me face-to-face: ‘We will wait until the day you are weakened and at that time we will attack you. Today you are strong, but you may be disintegrating from the inside, because you have many flaws. We will make a truce, but the day we recognize that you are weak, we will attack you.’ Twenty years have passed and this is what happened”remembers the doctor.
Today, Yuval Bitton does not regret having saved Yahya Sinouar’s life: “These are our values. And if I had to do it again, without hesitation, I would do it again.”
© Thibault Lefèvre
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