The Israeli military said on Thursday that it had killed Muhammad Deif, the elusive commander of Hamas’s military wing who has long been one of the country’s most wanted militants. He was widely seen as one of the chief architects of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
The announcement culminated weeks of speculation about the fate of Mr. Deif after an airstrike on July 13 on the outskirts of Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, that targeted him. At the time, the Israeli military did not say for certain whether he had been killed. Hamas has not explicitly confirmed or denied Israel’s claim on Thursday.
“Following an intelligence assessment, it can be confirmed that Muhammad Deif was eliminated in the strike,” the Israeli military statement said, without offering any more specific evidence that he was dead.
At least 90 people on the ground in the vicinity of the strike were killed that day, according to the Gazan health ministry. Its tally does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but health officials said some were women and children.
Mr. Deif, who survived several previous Israeli assassination attempts, has been the No. 2 Hamas leader inside Gaza. He is the highest-ranking Hamas figure inside Gaza that Israel says it has killed since Oct. 7.
Israel’s government made eliminating Hamas’s leadership a stated goal of the war, and Mr. Deif’s death would be counted as a victory in that effort. How Hamas’s operations could be affected remains to be seen, though: Israel has killed many senior commanders in the past, only to see the group swiftly replace them.
The announcement came a day after the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the Qatar-based leader of Hamas’s political bureau. He was killed in an explosion in the Iranian capital, Tehran. Both Hamas and Iran blamed Israel, which has not confirmed or denied its involvement.
Mr. Deif has been de facto second in command to the group’s leader inside Gaza, Yahya Sinwar.
Born in 1965 to a poor Palestinian family, Mr. Deif grew up in the Khan Younis refugee camp and joined Hamas as a young man, around the time the group was founded in the late 1980s.
He quickly rose through the organization’s ranks, developed a reputation as a master bomb maker and orchestrated a number of attacks on Israel, including a series of deadly bus bombings that undermined the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in the mid-1990s.
Analysts credit him with transforming Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, into a powerful and well-organized fighting force with tens of thousands in its ranks.
Mr. Deif’s success at escaping previous Israeli efforts to kill him — he was believed to have lost an eye and been seriously wounded — only enhanced his status in the eyes of some Palestinian admirers.
He survived more than eight attempts on his life, according to Israeli intelligence. In 2014, an Israeli airstrike killed one of his wives and at least one of his children, an infant son. In a brief 2021 conflict in Gaza, Israel’s military said it had tried to kill him several times.
When the Oct. 7 attack on Israel was underway, Mr. Deif released a recorded speech saying that Hamas had launched the assault so that “the enemy will understand that the time of their rampaging without accountability has ended.”
Since October, Israel has again had Mr. Deif in its cross hairs, killing his deputy, Marwan Issa, in March.
In May, Karim Khan, the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, requested a warrant for Mr. Deif’s arrest, accusing him and two other Hamas leaders of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The prosecutor also sought arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and its defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
Hamas criticized Mr. Khan for seeking to prosecute its leaders alongside Israeli officials, which it deemed “equating between the executioner and the victim.”
Mr. Deif spent decades underground in the tunnel network that typically shields Hamas leaders, according to Israeli intelligence officials, and had not been seen publicly in years. But officials recently said the Israeli military believed that he had developed health problems that forced him to spend more time above ground.
The strike that the Israeli military said killed him was authorized after prolonged surveillance of a house in southern Gaza where another top Hamas lieutenant, Rafa Salameh, was believed to be staying with his family, according to Israeli officials.
After learning that Mr. Deif appeared to be at the location, Israeli fighter jets struck with at least five precision-guided bombs, the officials said. Israel has said Mr. Salameh was also killed, a claim Hamas has not directly addressed.
That evening, Mr. Netanyahu said that an airstrike had targeted Mr. Deif but that there was not yet “absolute certainty” as to whether he had been killed.
“His hands are steeped in the blood of many Israelis,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “At the beginning of the campaign, I laid down a rule: The Hamas murderers are dead men, from the first to the last.”
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