Who was Mohammed Deif, the elusive Hamas military leader whose death the Israeli army announced?

Israel claims to have “eliminated” the head of Hamas’ armed wing in a strike on July 13 in the Gaza Strip. Mohammed Deif was considered the “architect” of the deadly terrorist attack on October 7.

Israel is now certain of this. Mohammed Deif, the head of Hamas’s armed wing, was “eliminated” in a strike on July 13 in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli army announced this on Thursday, August 1, based on “from an intelligence analysis”The man was alongside Rafa Salama, commander of Hamas’ armed wing in Khan Younis, who was also killed in the strike on the Al-Mawasi camp, which killed 92 Palestinians and wounded more than 300 others in the south of the Palestinian enclave, according to Hamas. The Islamist movement had denied that Mohammed Deif was among the victims. He had not yet commented on the Israeli army’s announcement on Thursday. Who was this man considered one of Israel’s oldest enemies? Some answers.

One of the masterminds of the October 7 attack

Head for twenty years of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, Mohammed Deif is considered, along with Rafa Salama, to be one of the organizers of the October 7 attack on Israeli soil. It was he who had announced, in a recording broadcast by Hamas, that very morning, the beginning of the operation “Al-Aqsa Flood”. On the audio tape, we hear this very secret military leader declare that “The enemy’s positions and fortifications were targeted by 5,000 rockets and shells in the first twenty minutes” of the attack. “The day has come to make our criminal enemy understand that his time is up,” he adds.

To illustrate the recording of Mohammed Deif, one of the few known portraits of whom is a blurred photo dating from his incarceration in Israel in 1989, Hamas had published the image of a man whose shadow and outlines can only be seen, as the movement always does so that its members are not identified. He was, since then, even more sought after by Israel, which has promised to destroy Hamas and its leaders.

According to Reuters news agency, it was in May 2021, after images appeared showing Israeli soldiers storming the Al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan, that Mohammed Deif began planning the October 7 operation.

Born in a refugee camp and involved in Hamas at a very early age

Mohammed Deif – nickname meaning “guest” in Arabic, because he is forced to sleep in a different place every night – was born Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri in 1965, in Khan refugee camp Younes, in the south of the Gaza Strip. A biology student at the Islamic University of Gaza, he was the head of the Student Union of the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement around which Hamas was created in 1987. At this time, he began his clandestine route.

In 2000, at the beginning of the second Intifada in the Palestinian Territories against the Israeli occupation, Mohammed Deif escaped – or is released – from a Palestinian Authority prison, during the time of Yasser Arafat. To the great displeasure of the Israelis. In 2002, he was appointed head of the armed wing of Hamas. In 2003, France Télévisions met him during a report in Gaza, in which he appeared masked. “We affirm that there will be no negotiations with Israel or with America”he asserted.

Survivor of several assassination attempts

Mohammed Deif had survived at least seven Israeli assassination attempts before that of July 13. Just after his accession to the command of the al-Qassam Brigades, he was the target of a first attempt to eliminate him by Israel in a car bomb attack. In 2006, He lost an arm and a leg in an F16 strike that hit the building where he was. Later, in 2014, he survived the dropping of five bunker-busting bombs, which killed his wife and seven-month-old child. At their funeral, the crowd had only one cry: “Revenge, revenge!” Mohammed Deif slips through the cracks again in 2021, in the most recent known attack against himaccording to Reuters.

By dint of escaping from Israel, Mohammed Deif, nicknamed “snake head” by the Israeli media, has earned another nickname, that of “cat with nine lives”For Hamas, he is the “chief of staff of the resistance”.

Behind the Hamas army build-up and tunnels under Gaza

In the 1990s, Mohammed Deif evolved Hamas’ military strategy, with suicide bombings on buses in Israel, captures of Israeli soldiers and the first rockets fired from Gaza into Israel. “He left his mark on the transformation of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, which went from a limited number of armed cells to a formal army with tens of thousands of fighters.”observe in the New York Times Ibrahim Madhoun, an analyst close to Hamas. According to the American daily, Israeli analysts also recognize that Mohammed Deif has transformed Hamas’ military wing into a more powerful and better organized fighting force.

He was also behind the construction of tunnels under Gaza, from which Hamas leaders and soldiers operated, notably to prepare for the October 7 attack. These feats of arms gave him an aura among the Palestinians, reinforced by the secrecy surrounding him. In early January, the Israeli army published a photo of a man lying on sandy ground with an acolyte at the foot of a grove, a thin beard, a round face, and salt-and-pepper hair. According to Tsahal, it was Mohammed Deif in a photo found on a hard drive in one of these underground Hamas bunkers.

In 2015, the person concerned was placed on the American list of “international terrorists”. This year, in May, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court requested an arrest warrant against him and two other senior Hamas officials, Yahya Sinwar, leader of the Islamist movement in Gaza, and Ismail Haniyeh, head of the political bureau in exile. The latter was also eliminated by the Israeli army in Tehran, Iran, on Wednesday.