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Journalism of Courage
Violence has been raging ever since the Palestinian militant organisation Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on Israel on Saturday (October 7). The toll has passed 1,100 and thousands have been wounded on both sides as of Monday.
Hamas and a smaller group named Islamic Jihad have also held captive more than 130 people from inside Israel and brought them into Gaza, to trade them for the release of thousands of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.
According to the Associated Press, Mohammed Deif, the leader of Hamas’ military wing, said “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” was in response to the “16-year blockade of Gaza, the Israeli occupation and a series of recent incidents that have brought Israeli-Palestinian tensions to a fever pitch”. But little is known about Deif himself, who is often described as a “shadowy” figure.
Deif has been the head of Hamas’s military wing since 2002. According to a recent profile in the Financial Times, he was born Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza during the 1960s. Gaza, at that point, had been under Egyptian control (from 1948 to 1967). Between 1967 to 2005, it was under Israeli rule and then it came under the Palestinian Authority from 2005 to 2007. In 2007, a Hamas coup led it to establish its control.
The report said either Deif’s uncle or father had taken part in the 1950s raids by armed Palestinians into the same area that Hamas fighters infiltrated in Israel on Saturday. Deif later went on to join the Islamic University of Gaza.
Hamas was founded in the late 1980s, after the beginning of the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Israeli capture of the two areas happened in the course of the 1967 Israeli-Arab War.
According to FT, Deif was in his 20s around the time of the first intifada. He was also later jailed by the Israelis, who held Deif responsible for the death of dozens of people in suicide bombings, including a wave in 1996 that killed more than 50 civilians.
These bombings were in response to the Oslo Peace Accords that were signed in the early 1990s between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the body representing most Palestinians. The accords aimed to bring about Palestinian self-determination, in the form of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. But Hamas was against it on the grounds that in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Israel gained control of Palestinian territories. The Accords, it argued, would effectively mean a loss of territory for Palestine.
“Deif is said to have studied under Yahya Ayyash, a bombmaker with the nickname “Engineer” who was assassinated by Israel in 1996 with a mobile phone packed with explosives,” the FT report said. Deif further became involved in the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas.
According to the BBC, although he only took over as Gaza commander of Hamas’s military wing in July 2002, Deif had been at the top of Israel’s “most wanted” list for years and had narrowly escaped the Israeli army’s efforts to kill him on several occasions. The year he took over, an Israeli helicopter fired missiles at a car near Gaza City in which two Hamas members were killed. At least 40 other people, including 15 children, were wounded in the attack.
The US State Department has designated him as a terrorist. “During the 2014 conflict between Israel and Hamas, Deif was the mastermind of Hamas’s offensive strategy,” it said. In 2014, Israel confirmed that it tried to assassinate Deif with a targeted strike on a house, in which his wife and seven-month-old son were believed to have been killed.
At the time, The New York Times quoted Ronen Bergman, an Israeli journalist specialising in security affairs, as saying: “Deif is the only prime military figure in Hamas to have survived so long. The fact that he was able to escape multiple assassination attempts and recover from severe injuries has built him the image and prestige of a bulletproof legend.”
The many attempts have reportedly left him in a wheelchair after losing an arm and a leg, according to FT, while other organisations have claimed he has also lost an eye.
The Financial Times report quoted Israeli officers as saying that Deif has sought high-impact targets, such as settlers and soldiers in the occupied territories, buses in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. “Within Hamas, the official said, Deif was an opponent of the complicated dance whereby Hamas would agree to halt fighting that sporadically flared, in exchange for Israel allowing additional funds into the blockaded strip or more work permits for Gazans,” it added.
