Israel launches major attack against a senior Hamas commander
TEL AVIV, Israel – Israel conducted a major airstrike in the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday morning that it said had targeted a top Hamas military commander who is considered one of the architects of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, according to six senior Israeli officials.
The Gaza Health Ministry said 90 people had been killed in the assault, half of them women and children, and 300 wounded.
The commander targeted in the attack, Mohammed Deif, is the leader of the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing. He is the second-most senior Hamas figure in Gaza, after its leader in the territory, Yahya Sinwar.
As of Saturday night, the status of Deif and Rafa Salama, the leader of Hamas forces in Khan Younis, who Israeli officials say was also targeted in the attack, was unclear.
Speaking to reporters Saturday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that Israeli forces had tried to assassinate Deif but that Israel did not yet have “absolute clarity” as to whether he had been killed.
Hamas said in a statement that Israel’s “allegations about targeting leaders are false” and are “merely to cover up the scale of the horrific massacre.”
The strike hit a strip of coastal land known as Muwasi, which Israel has designated as a humanitarian zone. Thousands of displaced Palestinians live there in tents, west of the city of Khan Younis and close to the Mediterranean Sea.
Despite the area’s designation, Israel has dropped bombs there and accused Palestinian militants of operating amid the civilian population to fire rockets.
Netanyahu said Ronen Bar, director of the Shin Bet intelligence agency, had presented the details of the operation to him early Saturday. The prime minister said he asked the security chief whether there were hostages in the area, the scale of the strike’s collateral damage and what kinds of munitions were to be used. “When I received answers that soothed my concerns, I gave the go-ahead,” he said.
The Israeli military and the Shin Bet issued a joint statement saying the strike had hit “an open area surrounded by trees, several buildings and sheds,” and it posted an aerial photograph of a plot of land filled with palm trees and a few houses. Three Israeli officials added that the military had targeted Deif while he was inside a fenced Hamas-run compound that was not used as a camp for displaced people.
Video filmed at the scene of the strike by Mustafa Abutaha, a professor of English, appeared to corroborate parts of Israel’s statement but not others.
The footage showed a large crater in a tree-lined plot of land close to a four-story residential building. A high wall separated part of the plot from the road, suggesting that it was an enclosed compound. But as he filmed the video, Abutaha said the plot had housed displaced people. Shortly afterward, a second man passed in front of the camera, holding a motionless child.
“You see this – a child, a little girl,” Abutaha said as the child was carried past. “You see the situation is very terrible.”
Two other Israeli officials said Deif had been targeted while he was above ground, after leaving Hamas’ tunnel network under Gaza. All the Israeli officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Mohammad Yousef, 48, said he and his mother were having breakfast when “suddenly the tent collapsed over our heads and the sand buried us.” The blast and shrapnel wounded four of his nine family members who were taken to nearby hospitals, he said.
Yousef said he helped dig people from under the sand and debris. “Many were fatal injuries,” he said in a phone call Saturday. “The survivors were rare.”
The Israeli military did not warn the civilians in the area to evacuate before the strikes, and they came as “a complete surprise,” Yousef said. “That’s why the death toll was so high.”
Deif has been one of Israel’s most wanted men for decades.
He is revered within some Palestinian circles for overseeing the development of Hamas’ military capabilities and has been a symbol of the group’s resilience, finding ways to survive despite being a top target of one of the most powerful militaries in the Middle East.
Considered a chief architect of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Deif released a recorded speech as that operation got underway, declaring it would make Israelis “understand that the time of their rampaging without accountability has ended.”
He has not been seen publicly in years, and there are few photos of him in the public domain. He is believed to be disabled, possibly missing an eye and some limbs. Israel bombed his home in 2014, killing his wife and infant son.
Deif was born in the mid-1960s to a poor Palestinian family and grew up in the Khan Younis refugee camp near Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, and Mohammed Dahlan, an exiled leader of Fatah, another Palestinian faction that rivals Hamas.
“He’s a legendary figure in Hamas,” Ibrahim Madhoun, an analyst close to Hamas, said in an interview, comparing him to Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader and founder of Hamas. “His fingerprints are on the transformation of the Qassam Brigades from a limited number of armed cells to a formal army that has tens of thousands of fighters.”
Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli intelligence officer specializing in Palestinian affairs, said Deif was one of Hamas’ most important military strategists.
“He’s the beating heart of Hamas’ military wing,” he said, noting that Deif has been at the helm of a force that includes elite fighters and naval commandos. “He has developed a force that almost has statehood capacities.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.