Mohammed Deif

Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri (Arabic: محمد دياب إبراهيم المصري, romanized: Muḥammad Diyāb Ibrāhīm al-Maṣrī;‎ 12 August 1965 – 13 July 2024), better known as Mohammed Deif (Arabic: محمد الضيف), was a Palestinian militant who served as the sixth commander of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades of Palestinian group Hamas. He succeeded Salah Shehade after the latter was killed in an Israeli airstrike in July 2002, until his own assassination by Israel in July 2024. He was succeeded by Mohammed Sinwar, the younger brother of Yahya Sinwar. He was a central figure in the Gaza war and one of the masterminds of the October 7 attacks, alongside Yahya Sinwar. Deif was born in 1965 in the Khan Yunis Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip (at the time occupied by Egypt), to a family that had fled or been expelled due to the 1948 war, which resulted in the creation of the state of Israel and what Palestinians call the Nakba. He reportedly left school temporarily to support his low-income family, later graduating with a bachelor's degree in chemistry from the Islamic University of Gaza in 1988, where he had established a theater group. Deif joined Hamas in 1987, weeks after it was established during the First Intifada against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories which had been ongoing since the Six-Day War in 1967. He later became known as Mohammed Deif, meaning "guest" in Arabic—possibly in reference to the nomadic lifestyle he adopted to avoid being targeted. During the 1990s and early 2000s, he planned several suicide bombing attacks, including the 1996 Jaffa Road bus bombings. He became the head of the al-Qassam Brigades in 2002 and developed the group's capabilities, transforming it from a cluster of amateur cells to organized military units. He masterminded the group's strategy of combining...