Hamas on Thursday confirmed the martyrdom of its key leader Muhammad Deif in the Israeli attack, however, the organization spokesperson did not provide further details about the attack in his video statement.
Earlier, Israel had claimed the killing of Muhammad Deif in a strike on southern Gaza on July 13, last year, however, Hamas did not confirm this claim until now.
Who was Muhammad Deif?
Muhammad Deif was the leader of Hamas’s military wing Alqasim Brigade in Gaza and one of the chief architects of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that ignited a war.
His real name was Muhammad al-Masri and was one of the most senior Hamas leaders in Gaza. He was one of Israel’s most-wanted militants for decades. He survived many Israeli assassination attempts before the one that martyred him and was lionized by Palestinians as a symbol of Hamas’s resilience.
Born in 1965 to a poor Palestinian family, Mr. Deif grew up in the Khan Younis refugee camp in southern Gaza. In the 1980s, he studied at the Islamic University of Gaza, focusing on the sciences, and joined Hamas around the time it was founded in the late 1980s.
He quickly rose through the ranks, developing a reputation as a master bombmaker and orchestrating some attacks on Israel, including a series of deadly bus bombings that killed dozens of people and derailed the peace process in the mid-1990s.
Not long after Hamas was founded, Israel imprisoned Mr. Deif for 16 months, starting in May 1989.
Mr. Deif was also held by the Palestinian Authority for a short time starting in 2000. At that time, the Palestinian Authority was a governing body with limited autonomy over parts of the West Bank and Gaza, and it was dominated by Fatah.
Mr. Deif was “the beating heart” of Hamas’s military wing and one of its most important military strategists, said Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli intelligence officer specializing in Palestinian affairs.
There were few photographs of Mr. Deif in circulation, and he was rarely seen or heard from as he spent decades in hiding. His adopted name, “Deif,” means “guest” in Arabic, widely understood as a nod to the frequency with which he changed locations to avoid death or capture.
