2024-07-14 06:22:53
Israel announced that it had targeted the leader of the military wing of Hamas, Mohammed Deif, in an airstrike on the Al-Mawasi area near Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, which the movement later denied.
Who is Mohammed Al-Deif?
- Muhammad Diab Ibrahim Al-Masry (Abu Khaled) was born in 1965 in Khan Yunis refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
- He later became known as “Mohammed Deif,” after joining Hamas during the First Intifada in 1987.
- Just two years after joining Hamas, he was arrested and spent 16 months in Israeli prisons.
- Al-Daif developed Hamas’s tunnel network in the Gaza Strip, and also developed his expertise in bomb-making.
- Al-Daif has been a target of Israel for years, surviving at least seven known assassination attempts, the last of which was in 2014 when he was targeted by an Israeli airstrike in the besieged Gaza Strip, killing his wife and one of their children.
- He lost an eye and suffered serious injuries to one leg in previous assassination attempts.
- After surviving several assassination attempts, his supporters in Gaza dubbed him “the man with nine lives.”
- “Al-Daif” is believed to have masterminded much of Hamas’s October 7 attack, after Hamas’s Gaza chief, Yahya Sinwar.
- For nearly 30 years, “Al-Daif” has been involved in some of Israel’s most brutal attacks, from kidnapping soldiers and rocket attacks, to military operations and the unprecedented October 7 attack.
- Al-Daif became head of Hamas’s armed wing in 2002, after his predecessor, Salah Shehadeh, was assassinated in an Israeli raid.
- Al-Daif was placed on the US blacklist of “global terrorists” in 2015 and was placed on the EU’s terrorism list last December.
More than 70 Palestinians were killed and about 300 were injured today, Saturday, in several successive Israeli raids on the Al-Mawasi area. Hamas leader Sami Abu Zuhri considered that “the Israeli reports indicating that Al-Daif was targeted are ‘empty talk’.”
The Israeli newspaper Maariv said that “the security services in Israel are ‘optimistic’ about the results of the Mawasi operation, with regard to targeting ‘al-Daif’. Israeli media also reported that ‘Rafeh Salama’, the commander of the Khan Yunis Brigade in Hamas, was alongside al-Daif among the targets of the Israeli strike.
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2024-07-14 06:22:53