New Delhi: The mastermind of the terror blitzkrieg against Israel on Saturday morning, which claimed the lives of about 900 people, is a wheel-chair bound Mohammed Deif, the head of the military wing of the Hamas.
In fact, Deif broadcast a voice message, claiming the Saturday terror attack in which Hamas fighters barged into Israel through border fences, landed on beaches and infiltrated through air using motorised paragliders. “This is the day of the greatest battle to end the last occupation on earth,” he was quoted as saying.
Now in his 60s, Deif (whose Arabic meaning is ‘guest’) is the one of the most wanted men in Israel and has escaped multiple attempts by the Mossad to eliminate him. He has been the leader of Hamas’s military wing since 2002.
Hamas is an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya. It is a designated terrorist group by Israel, the US, the UK and the European Union.
Deif is said to have survived five assassination attempts by Israel in 2001, 2002, 2006, 2014 and most recently in May 2021. Though he managed to escape these attacks over the years, Deif lost a leg, an arm and an eye. An aerial strike in 2014 targeting him, killed his wife and a two-year-old child.
Elusive, shadowy figure
Born Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri in Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza during the 1960s, Deif has been in Israeli jails for being part of several attacks including a 1996 bombing which killed more than 50 civilians.
“Even before this (Saturday attack), Deif was like a sacred personality and very much respected both within Hamas and by the Palestinians,” Mkhaimar Abusada, a professor of politics at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, told Financial Times. “His biggest operation against Israel will have now turned him into a figure ‘like a God to the young’.”
According to the report, Israeli and Palestinian analysts along with people who knew Deif before he joined militancy described him as a “quiet, intense man uninterested in the internecine rivalries of Palestinian factions”. He was known to be “single-minded about changing the nature of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and using violence as a means to achieve it.”
Deif is known to be a shadowy figure who evolved alongside the Israeli military in its technological advancements. This was illustrated during a 11-day war between the Palestinian military group and Israel in 2021. Hamas had deployed swarms of low-tech rockets in an attempt to overwhelm Israel’s air defence system.
A one-time bomb-maker, Deif is the architect of a decade-long programme to dig a network of tunnels under Gaza. He is said to have honed his skills under Hamas chief bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash nicknamed “Engineer”, who was assassinated by Israel in January 1996 with a mobile phone packed with explosives.
An Israeli official familiar with Deif’s case told Financial Times that either his uncle or father had taken part in the sporadic 1950s raids by armed Palestinians into the same swath of land that Deif’s fighters infiltrated Saturday.
“By the time Hamas was born in the late 1980s, forged in the fire of the first Intifada, or uprising, against Israel’s occupation, Deif was in his 20s,” the report stated.
Singular in his belief in armed conflict with Israel, Deif swiftly moved up the ranks of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. He was involved in the creation of the first rudimentary rockets. Today, Hamas’s arsenal is now in tens of thousands, with its fighters firing 3,500 rockets on Saturday alone.
(Edited by Tony Rai)