Israel’s most wanted: Mohammed Deif, the mastermind behind Hamas massacre

Meet ‘The Guest’, the blind man with one arm and nine lives who survived repeated assassination attempts to mastermind the ‘Al Aqsa Flood’ in revenge for a 2021 mosque attack.

When Israel began dropping bombs on the Gaza Strip, a massive cluster was aimed at targets across the Qizan an Najjar neighbourhood in Khan Yunis in search of one man.

Palestinian terrorist Mohammad Deif, the elusive Hamas mastermind behind the massacre in Israel, is never seen and has rarely been heard in three decades on the top of Israel’s most wanted list.

But his bloodstained fingerprints were all over the horror that flooded across the Israel border in a wave of torture, beheadings, and indiscriminate killing.

Mohammed Deif, leader of Hamas's military wing in undated image.

There are only three confirmed photos of the leader, with the most recent dating back two decades around the year 2000. Picture: Supplied

Israeli jets struck the home of Deif’s father, killing the Hamas commander’s brother, son, and his brother’s granddaughter, with an unknown number of relatives trapped in the rubble, according to Hezbollah-linked Lebanese news network Al Maydeen.

The whereabouts of Deif, who has survived multiple Israeli assassination attempts, remains unknown. There are only three known photographs of the leader of the Al-Qassam Brigades.

On Saturday, Hamas’s TV channel played a recording of Deif’s rarely heard voice.

“Today the rage of Al Aqsa, the rage of our people and nation is exploding. Our mujahedeen, today is your day to make this criminal understand that his time has ended,” the recording said.

Hamas released voice recordings of their elusive leader, and images of a man shrouded in shadows. Picture: Hamas

In naming the operation the Al Aqsa Flood, Deif marked a direct connection of this week’s terror attack to payback for the breakout of violence at the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem in 2021, which set off 11 days of fighting between Israel and Hamas.

Footage of the violence enraged Deif, who went dormant for two and a half years to plan his revenge. Real name unknown, Deif is an Arabic moniker translated as “The Guest”.

“It’s a reference to the fact he doesn’t stay more than one night in the same place to avoid being caught by Israel,” explains Jacob Eriksson, a specialist in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the University of York.

He has been on Israel’s most wanted list for nearly 30 years, and in 2015 was declared a terrorist by the United States under then-president Barack Obama.

In that time he has survived several assassination attempts that earned him the nickname as “the man with nine lives”, though he is believed to have lost his sight, one arm and one leg after an Israeli attack in 2006.

The secret to his survival is the only known official photo taken somewhere around the year 2000 and scant details about his life.

Real name suggested to be Mohammed al-Masri, he was born in the Khan Yunis refugee camp in southern Gaza in the 1960s, according to an Israeli intelligence official who spoke with the Financial Times.

Palestinians inspect the wreckage of Hamas bomb expert, Mohammed Deif's car, which exploded in Gaza City, after it was fired at by Israeli helicopters missiles in 2002. Picture: AP Photo/Adel Hana

In 2014, the Washington Post reported that Deif studied at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he frequented members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas would later become an offshoot.

He joined the Islamist organisation in the late 1980s with the help of Yahya Ayyash — known as “the Engineer” — one of Hamas’s main explosives experts with whom Deif was very close.

After orchestrating suicide bombing attacks in the 1990s, Deif became increasingly important within Hamas after Ayyash’s assassination by Israeli intelligence services in 1996. He was appointed head of the Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades in 2002.

Israel flattened the city centre of Khan Yunis, where Deif’s family are believed to have been killed. Picture: AFP

One of his early achievements as a leader was to apply lessons from the second intifada in the early 2000s. He masterminded the construction of underground tunnels allowing Hamas fighters to launch incursions into Israeli territory from Gaza. He also emphasised the use of rockets as extensively as possible.

“In response to Israel’s fortifying the border with walls, he developed Hamas’s ‘below and above strategy’, meaning digging tunnels for Hamas militants to go into Israel and sending rockets,” Omri Brinner, an Israel and Middle East analyst at the International Team for the Study of Security Verona, said.

Deif’s personality and the respect he inspires in Gaza can also partly explain how the ambitious attack succeeded despite the Israeli intelligence services’ widely recognised effectiveness.

“The fact that Hamas planned this operation for a year — according to the latest estimations — without any information leaking speaks to the loyalty the select few who were involved in the planning of the operation have to Deif”

- With AFP

Originally published as Israel’s most wanted: Mohammed Deif, the mastermind behind Hamas massacre