Israel declares it killed Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif in July air strike

Israel has determined that it killed Mohammed Deif, eliminating a planner of the October 7 attacks and a militant it had tried to kill for decades.

Mohammed Deif was killed during an air strike in July, Israel says. Picture: AFP

Israel has determined that it killed top Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif in a July air strike, the country’s military said Thursday, eliminating a planner of the October 7 attacks and a militant it had tried to kill for decades.

Deif is the most senior military leader of the US-designated terrorist group whom Israel says it has killed in more than nine months of fighting in the Gaza Strip and the third high-ranking enemy of the country to be declared dead in 48 hours.

Israel said on Wednesday (AEST) it had killed Fuad Shukr, a top commander with the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, in an air strike in Beirut, and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in a mysterious strike just hours later in Tehran.

Those two attacks provoked furious responses from Hezbollah and Iran and have sparked concerns of an escalatory spiral that could lead to a wider Middle East War.

Deif is believed to have been a key planner of the Hamas-led October 7 attacks that left 1200 people dead and around 250 taken hostage. Israeli military officials had said earlier in July that they believed they had killed him in a strike on a Hamas-controlled compound, but hadn’t previously claimed that it had succeeded. Hamas said at the time of the strike that Deif wasn’t killed.

Israel targeted Deif on July 13 with a massive air strike in which it dropped eight 2,000-pound bombs on western Khan Younis in part of an area that Israel had declared a humanitarian zone. The commander of Hamas’s Khan Younis brigade, Rafa Salama, also was killed in the strike, the Israeli military has said.

Mohammed Deif.

Gaza officials said scores of Palestinian civilians were killed and many more wounded in the strike, which they said was in the Al-Mawasi area of the humanitarian zone, where the military had told civilians to go in previous evacuations. Hamas disputed that Deif was the target, saying Israel was making excuses for killing many civilians.

Israel’s military said it took precautions to limit civilian casualties. It acknowledged the area was surrounded by civilians, but said responsibility for civilian casualties lay with Deif and his fighters for seeking to hide among them.

More than 39,000 people have been killed in the fighting in Gaza, according to health authorities in the enclave, whose figures don’t say how many were combatants.

Israel had indications in the days before the strike that it might get the opportunity to target Deif, one of Hamas’s most secretive commanders, and had only a short period to act after getting information that he was on site, a military official said.

Israel had made numerous attempts to kill Deif since 2002, which forced him to move between homes. Few people inside Hamas had even met him. He remained in the shadows over the past two decades, hiding from Israeli bombs and bullets. His real name wasn’t believed to be Deif, which in Arabic means “guest” in reference to his nomadic lifestyle, but Mohammed al-Masri, according to the US government, which designated him a terrorist.

Deif is considered to be responsible for the transformation of Hamas’s military wing from an insurgent militia into a capable fighting force, after becoming commander of the wing, known as the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, in the early 2000s. Through this position he rose to be one of the most influential Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip, second on Israel’s threat list behind Hamas’s Gaza chief, Yahya Sinwar.

According to Israel, Deif was the protégé of Yahya Ayyash, an explosives expert known as the Engineer. Israel later blamed Deif for a series of bus bombings in the 1990s that killed dozens and marred the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords peace process.

Deif has also been described as a force behind Hamas’s local production of rockets, the development of the group’s extensive subterranean tunnel network in Gaza and the enhancement of Hamas’s organised fighting forces, including the commando units that raided Israel last fall.

In March, Israel killed Marwan Issa, who was considered Hamas’s No.3 official in Gaza behind Sinwar and Deif.

The Wall Street Journal