Israel vows to take out the architect of massacre - on the eighth attempt
The near misses may have left him confined to a wheelchair after losing an arm and a leg, but Deif is revered among Palestinian youths after orchestrating the biggest ever terrorist attack on Israel.
Hiding in a bunker or tunnel somewhere in Gaza this weekend, Mohammed Deif, the secretive commander of Hamas’s military wing, will be wondering if he can cheat death for an eighth time.
Israeli intelligence officials believe that the science graduate, 58, was the main architect of last Saturday’s massacre, which claimed more than 1,300 lives, and have vowed to take him out once and for all after seven previous assassination attempts.
The near misses may have left him confined to a wheelchair after losing an arm and a leg, but Deif, whose nom de guerre means “guest” in Arabic, is revered among Palestinian youths after orchestrating the biggest ever terrorist attack on Israel.
Deif, however, is not the only “dead man walking”, as Herzi Halevi, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) chief of staff put it on Thursday. He is one of several key figures in the Hamas leadership, including some who have made their homes in Qatar, Turkey and Lebanon, who now face a reckoning.
Emerging from the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist organisation, in the late 1980s, Hamas has for many years claimed to operate on two levels.
Its military wing, known as the al-Qassam Brigades, has carried out kidnappings and suicide bombings in an effort to achieve its goal of destroying Israel. Its political wing, led by Ismail Haniyeh, 61, has focused on social work and advocacy for Palestinians and, since seizing control in 2007, has governed around 2.3 million people living in the Gaza Strip.
Haniyeh, who, like Deif, was born in a Gazan refugee camp and has served time in Israeli prisons, heads Hamas’s 15-member politburo, which is elected by a consultative shura council.
Like his long-term predecessor, Khaled Meshaal, Haniyeh has resided in Doha, the Qatari capital, since 2020, because Egypt restricts his movements in and out of Gaza.
Last Saturday, Haniyeh, who is married with 13 children, was filmed cheering alongside other Hamas officials in Doha in response to news of the slaughter in Israel. He soon released a gloating statement in which he hailed a “great victory” and praised Hamas’s “pious and courageous fighters”.
In an apparent warning to Saudi Arabia, which has sought to follow the United Arab Emirates and other Muslim countries in normalising relations with Israel, Haniyeh said: “We say to all countries, including our beloved Arab countries, you must know that this entity which is incapable of protecting itself from our fighters is incapable of providing you with security and protection.”
Since last weekend’s surprise attack, there has been speculation that the operation was kept to a very tight circle of people to stop the plans leaking out - and that Haniyeh may not have been in the loop.
However, Dr Matthew Levitt, a former FBI official who now leads on counter- terrorism and intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank, believes this is implausible.
“There is no way in hell that the Hamas leadership would not have known about this operation,” he said.
Although Haniyeh and others might not have been made aware of specific operational details, Levitt said the “watershed” massacre “puts to bed the myth that there are distinct wings within the organisation”.
“That’s a western concept that many have come up with, particularly in Europe,” he said.
While Britain proscribed Hamas’s military wing as a terrorist organisation in 2001, it did not outlaw its political wing - and the entity as a whole - until 2021. At least two senior former Hamas officials are still thought to live in London.
Since taking over as leader in 2017, Haniyeh has fully restored Hamas’s ties to Iran, its main sponsor, and visited Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader in Tehran, in June.
It followed a previous rift in which Meshaal closed Hamas’s main political office in Damascus in protest at President Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown on Sunni Muslims in Syria - a move which was backed by Shia-led Iran.
Last week, Meshaal, 67, who is now in charge of Palestinian diaspora affairs at Hamas, called for a day of protest against Israel across the Muslim world and urged neighbouring countries to join the conflict.
“To all the scholars who teach jihad . . . to all who teach and learn, this is a moment for the application [of theories],” he said.
Although Deif, whose wife and two infant children were killed by an IDF airstrike in 2014, has been Israel’s most wanted man for almost two decades, two other Hamas leaders are also in the immediate crosshairs.
The home of Yahya Sinwar, 60, the group’s political leader in the Gaza Strip, has already reportedly come under fire in the past week.
Sinwar is a founding member of Hamas’s military wing and its intelligence service.
In 1988, he was arrested for murdering Palestinian collaborators with Israel and for his role in the capture and killing of two Israeli soldiers. Sinwar was given four life sentences, but was released in 2011 as part of a prisoner swap which saw 1,000 Hamas inmates exchanged for Gilad Shalit, a kidnapped Israeli soldier who had been held for five years.
Meanwhile, Israeli security officials believe that Saleh al-Arouri, Hamas’s deputy leader and a former military commander, was involved alongside Deif in planning the October 7 atrocity.
Like several other senior figures in the organisation, Arouri, 57, who comes from the West Bank, lived in Turkey, a Nato country, for a number of years before moving to Beirut in Lebanon, where he now resides.
An architect of Hamas’s kidnapping strategy, Arouri has spent more than 15 years in Israeli jails. Following his release in 2010, he was warned that he would be rearrested if he did not leave the region.
“I find it very difficult to believe that Arouri was not involved in at least the strategic planning [of the attack],” said Levitt. “He is a participant and a leader of what Iran, Hezbollah [Tehran’s proxy in Lebanon] and Hamas call a joint operations room in Beirut.”
As Israel prepares for a ground invasion of Gaza in its effort to stamp out Hamas, some analysts warn that it could breed a new generation of terrorists.
“They can’t eliminate them altogether,” said Dr Hisham Hellyer, a senior associate fellow in international security at the Royal United Services Institute think tank.
“They will cripple them. It will mean that Hamas is on the back foot. But Gaza has a very young population . . . and what comes next could prove to be a fertile recruiting ground.”
