Close surveillance led to Israeli attack on Hamas compound

TEL AVIV, Israel – For weeks, Israel kept watch on a palm-tree-dotted villa in the southern Gaza Strip where it believed a top Hamas lieutenant was staying with his family, but it held off on a strike, according to three senior Israeli defense officials. The Israelis had a bigger target in mind: Muhammad Deif, the elusive leader of Hamas’ military wing.

On Saturday, after learning that Deif appeared to be at the villa, the officials said, the Israeli government sent in fighter jets that devastated the compound and killed dozens of Palestinians in the area around it.

The Israeli military and the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, said Sunday that the strike had killed the lieutenant, Rafa Salameh.

But the fate of Deif, who is second in command of Hamas and considered an architect of its Oct. 7 attack on Israel, remained unclear. He has survived other assassination attempts.

The Israeli government defended the decision to order the strike – which the officials said used at least five U.S.-made precision-guided bombs – in an area Israel itself has designated a humanitarian zone for Palestinians driven from their homes by the war between Israel and Hamas.

The strike was authorized after prolonged observation of the villa, one of Salameh’s secret command posts, according to the three senior Israeli officials.

The villa is in an area known as Mawasi, west of Khan Younis near the Mediterranean Sea. It belonged to Salameh’s family, two of the officials said, and Salameh began spending more time there in recent months after Israeli forces overran many of his other strongholds in Khan Younis, both above and below ground, according to two of the officials. All the officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about details of the operation.

Salameh still spent much of his time in Hamas’ underground tunnel network, but he also stayed regularly at the villa, along with his family and other militants, to escape the stifling conditions in the tunnels, the officials said.

Officers from an Israeli unit that oversees the identification of high-value targets, staffed by operatives from military intelligence and the Shin Bet, detected Salameh’s presence several weeks ago, the officials said. But, they added, Israeli leaders decided to delay any attempts to kill him to see if he would be joined at some point by Deif.

Earlier assassination attempts against Deif are believed to have left him disabled, and he may be missing an eye and limbs. The Israeli military believes that he has developed health problems that force him to spend more time than other Hamas leaders do above ground, outside the tunnel network, the officials said.

They became more confident that Deif might enter Salameh’s compound after a growing cache of evidence suggested that he placed unusual trust in his subordinate. The evidence included a recently uncovered photograph, reviewed by the New York Times, of the two men relaxing together in a garden.

On Friday, Israeli intelligence officers received information suggesting that Deif had appeared at the villa, the officials said. The news was sent up the chain of command to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who signed off on the strike, he said.

When the military received further indications of Deif’s presence after 10 a.m. on Saturday, it sent in the jets. It also launched an additional airstrike near emergency responders, videos and photographs reviewed by the Times show.

It was not immediately clear how the strike might affect cease-fire talks aimed at pausing the fighting in Gaza and freeing the hostages held by Hamas. After weeks of impasse, they had resumed in recent days.

But in a sign that the negotiations might continue, Izzat al-Rishq, a member of Hamas’ political bureau, rejected a news report citing an unnamed Hamas official saying the group had decided to halt the talks. Al-Rishq said in an official statement Sunday that the report was “not true and baseless.”

Analysts said that while some interruption might be expected in the negotiations, Hamas’ fundamental interest in such a deal remains.

Hamas has no option but to go back to the negotiating table, said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political science professor at Gaza’s Al-Azhar University, which is affiliated with Fatah, the main Palestinian political rival of Hamas.

“Hamas is in a very bad position,” he said. “It has been pushed into a corner militarily, and there is no question that it has been weakened after nine months.”

Though the strike took place inside a designated humanitarian zone, Israeli leaders said they believed the risk to civilians was reduced by the fact the two men were inside a Hamas-run compound, the officials said.

But at least 90 people were killed, about half of them women and children, and 300 were wounded, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Reports from the Gaza Strip described hospitals overwhelmed by injured Palestinians.

The casualties included several children, some of whom were either paralyzed or required amputations, according to a senior U.N. official, Scott Anderson. Anderson visited a nearby hospital after the attack and said he had seen dozens of people wounded by the blast.

And for all the deaths, a Hamas official suggested on Sunday that Deif remained very much alive. The official, Khalil al-Hayya, who lives in exile, said in an interview with Al Jazeera Arabic that Deif was listening to Netanyahu’s words and “mocking” them.

Netanyahu himself, in a televised news conference Saturday night, said there was still no “absolute certainty” that Deif had been killed.

Though Salameh was not the main target, the Israeli military and the Shin Bet described him as “one of the closest associates” of Deif and said that he, too, had been “one of the masterminds” of the Oct. 7 attack. Among other duties, they said, he was responsible for all launches of projectiles toward Israeli territory from the Khan Younis area.

“The elimination of Rafa Salameh significantly impedes Hamas’ military capabilities,” they said in a joint statement Sunday afternoon.