RAMALLAH, West Bank (news agencies) — Mohammed Deif, Hamas’ longtime shadowy military leader and one of the alleged masterminds of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that sparked the war in Gaza, is said to be dead following an Israeli airstrike last month.
The Israeli military said it killed Deif in a massive strike in southern Gaza on July 13, citing “an intelligence assessment.” There was no immediate comment from Hamas officials on Israel’s claim.
One of the founders of Hamas’ military wing, the Qassam Brigades, in the 1990s, Deif led the unit for decades. Under his command, it carried out dozens of suicide bombings against Israelis on buses and at cafes and built up a formidable arsenal of rockets that could strike deep into Israel and often did.
He gained mythical status among Palestinians, surviving a string of Israeli assassination attempts and not showing his face in public for decades. For years, he topped Israel’s most-wanted list.
Israel says Deif and Hamas’ political leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, were the chief architects of the Oct. 7 attack. Together they succeeded in foiling Israel’s vaunted border defenses, surprising the region’s most powerful military and unleashing an unprecedented attack that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took roughly 250 others hostage into Gaza. The attack triggered the Israel-Hamas war that has killed more than 39,000 Palestinians.
On the morning of the attack, Hamas issued a rare voice recording of Deif announcing the “Al Aqsa Flood” operation. In the message, he railed against military raids in the occupied West Bank and violence in east Jerusalem and called on all Palestinians to rise up and take part.
“Enough is enough,” he said. “Kill, burn, destroy and block the roads. Make them understand that the Al Aqsa Flood is more powerful than they think and believe.”
The military’s claim that he was dead came a day after Hamas’ political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in an alleged Israeli strike on Tehran.
Those developments could help set the tone for the remainder of the war. They could imperil cease-fire talks and raise fears of a regional escalation.
But the alleged demise of Deif, a long-wanted figure said to be behind the deadliest attack in Israel’s history, would also be a major win for Israel. It could present Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a political off-ramp to end the war, allowing him to retreat from his lofty promises of “total victory” while showing Israelis that Hamas’ military capabilities suffered a debilitating blow.
At the same time, his killing would be a significant setback for Hamas, both symbolically and strategically, since it may have lost a unique player in the Palestinian armed struggle against Israel, even if that struggle likely won’t end with Deif’s alleged death. He was believed to be 58 or 59.
Born Mohammed al-Masri, his nom de guerre, Deif, means “guest” in Arabic — a moniker that reflected his tendency to change locations frequently to hide from Israel.
Deif, like Sinwar, grew up in a refugee camp of the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis in the mid-1960s. Gaza is home to several such camps whose inhabitants fled or were forced from their homes in what is now Israel during the war surrounding the country’s establishment in 1948.
He is believed to have joined Hamas shortly after the formation of the Islamist Palestinian group in the late 1980s, at the onset of the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising. The group’s ideology calls for armed resistance and the violent destruction of Israel.
In 1989, during the height of the uprising, Deif was arrested by Israel but later released.
Michael Koubi, a former director of the investigations department at Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security agency, is one of the few Israelis to have met Deif personally when he was a quiet, bookish 16-year-old imprisoned in a detention facility in Khan Younis for throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers. “He was very, very patriotic, very involved in the intifada,” Koubi said.