Hamas military wing chief Mohammed Deif was killed in a July strike, says Israel, day after Haniyeh’s assassination

‘Following an intelligence assessment, it can be confirmed that Mohammed Deif was eliminated in the strike,” the Israeli military said on Thursday.

This comes a day after a senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Iran. While Hamas accused Israel of the killing and called it a “severe escalation” amid the ongoing conflict, Iran’s supreme leader vowed revenge against Israel. “We consider his revenge as our duty,” Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a statement on his official website. He said Israel had “prepared a harsh punishment for itself” by killing “a dear guest in our home.”

Deif was the leader of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of militant group Hamas, which carried out the raids into southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking 250 hostage.

Deif was reportedly Number 2 in the hierarchy within Hamas, after Yahya Sinwar, the leader of the group. He was reportedly the architect of the October 7 attack, dubbed “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm”. Deif had released a statement after the attack, saying that it was 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”, according to an AP report at the time.