Israel targeted Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif in strike
Mohammed Deif was a key planner of the October 7 attack and a militant Israel has hunted for two decades, but Benjamin Netanyahu says there’s not ‘complete confirmation’ he is dead.
Israel targeted top Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif in an overnight air strike, taking aim at a key planner of the October 7 attack and a militant it has hunted for two decades.
The Israeli military is still assessing whether the strike near Khan Younis in southern Gaza killed Deif and another militant targeted in the attack, Rafa Salama, the brigade commander of Hamas’s Khan Younis forces.
“There’s still not complete confirmation,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a news conference Saturday night, local time.
If Deif is in fact dead, he would be the most senior leader of the US-designated terrorist group to have been killed by Israel in more than nine months of fighting in the Gaza Strip, which followed the Hamas-led October 7 attack that left 1200 people dead in Israel and more than 240 taken as hostages.
Israel had indications in recent days that it might have the opportunity to strike Deif, one of Hamas’s most secretive commanders, but the window only emerged in real time, one official said.
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, where Israel has told Gaza civilians to move to avoid fighting elsewhere.
An Israeli security official said the strike was in nearby western Khan Younis, within an area recently added to the military’s demarcated humanitarian zone.
“We chose to attack because we knew we were attacking a Hamas compound in this area,” the official said.
Two Israeli security officials said the strike was carried out in a fenced area controlled by Hamas within a broader open area, not a place with tents, and that most of the people killed were militants, including people assigned to guard Deif and Salama.
Hamas disputed Israel’s claims that the strike targeted Deif.
“These false claims are merely to cover up the extent of the horrific massacre,” the group wrote.
Jordan and Egypt also expressed anger that the strike was conducted within a humanitarian area. Israeli officials blamed Hamas for embedding itself among civilians.
The strike is likely to complicate ongoing talks to strike a deal that would pause the fighting in exchange for the release of hostages still held in Gaza. Israel and Hamas revived U.S.- and Arab-mediated attempts to reach an agreement in the past week after several previous failures to do so.
Pressure has been building on Netanyahu to secure a deal, even as he insists that any agreement must enable Israel to restart its campaign to uproot Hamas, a demand that Hamas has rejected.
Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, have said military pressure is critical to bringing Hamas into an agreement. An Israeli official said Gallant called in senior security officials to discuss the potential effect of the overnight strike on talks before approving the mission.
Netanyahu on Saturday said that he had given a standing order at the beginning of the war to kill Hamas’s senior leadership. Netanyahu held a security assessment with top advisers on Saturday.
Israel has made numerous attempts to kill Deif since 2002, forcing him to move between homes. Few people inside Hamas have met Deif, who has remained in the shadows over the past two decades, fearful of Israeli bombs and bullets. His real name isn’t believed to be Deif – which in Arabic means “guest,” in reference to his nomadic lifestyle – but rather Mohammed al-Masri, according to the U.S. government, which designates him a terrorist. Deif is largely credited with transforming Hamas’s military wing, known as the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, from an insurgent militia into a capable fighting force since becoming its commander 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 peace process known as the Oslo Accords.
Deif is also credited with being a force behind Hamas’s local development of rockets, as well as supporting the development of Gaza’s extensive subterranean tunnel network and scaling up the quality 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 third most senior official in Gaza, behind Deif and Sinwar.
Abeer Ayyoub, Suha Ma’ayeh and Nancy A. Youssef contributed to this article.
The Wall Street Journal
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