Mohammed Deif: Inside mind of Palestine’s ‘New Bin Laden’ who masterminded Hamas attack on Israel

Mohammed Deif, the most wanted Hamas man in Israel, gestures in this old picture of his — AFP

Mohammed Deif, a mysterious man, who has survived seven assassination attempts and has been nicknamed the “New Osama Bin Laden”, is said to be the mastermind of Hamas’s surprise attack that caught Israel off guard — dubbed as the biggest intelligence failure in the history of the oppressive Jewish state.

Mohammed Deif has been Israel’s most wanted man for decades.

The 58-year-old is permanently confined to a wheelchair after attempts to kill him resulted in the loss of both of his hands, legs and an eye.

He stays alive by travelling to different safe houses or hiding out in Gaza’s network of underground tunnels, which he helped plan.

He changed his name to Deif, which in Arabic means “The Guest,” to symbolise his many transfers from one family to another. He was born in a refugee camp.

His real name is Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, born in Gaza in 1965.

He made a recording as his soldiers were pouring into Israel to murder or kidnap men, women, and children in his capacity as leader of the al-Qassam brigades, Hamas’s military arm.

He pleaded for the Palestinians to “drive out the occupiers and tear down the walls.”

He also urged followers in other nations to join the battle, raising concerns of a global uprising.

After the attack, he will be “like a god to the young,” according to Mkhaimar Abusada, a politics lecturer at Gaza’s Al-Azhar University.

He added, “He is exactly like Bin Laden. This is an arch-murderer.”

Only two known photographs of Deif, including an Israeli ID photo from 30 years ago, have been made public, and even in Gaza, only a small number of individuals would be able to identify him.

In fact, his alias “Guest” is thought to be a reference to the custom of Palestinian combatants staying each night at a different sympathiser’s home to evade Israeli intelligence.

His past is littered with bombings and the murder of several unarmed bystanders. Deif oversaw numerous terrorist assaults, including bus bombings in Israel that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people. He also served as the military branch of Hamas.

Deif, also known as Abu Khaled, is hence by far Israel’s top-priority target in Gaza. Israel has attempted to murder him five times, most recently in May 2021 after attempts in 2001, 2002, 2006, and 2014.

Deif was able to avoid being hurt in the most recent bombings, but the earlier ones left him blind, cost him both legs and an arm, and murdered his wife and two children.

Those who are familiar with the menacing figure have described him as a quiet, focused man who is uninterested in long-standing disputes among Palestinian factions. Instead, he uses violence at every opportunity to end the Israeli-Arab conflict once and for all.

As seen by Saturday’s frightening film, which is alleged to have sprung from his experience in an acting group he joined while he was at the Islamic University of Gaza, he enjoys theatrics.

Deif was in his 20s when Hamas was founded in the late 1980s; at about that same time, Israeli soldiers imprisoned him.

“From the beginning of his life in Hamas, he was focused on the military track,” Ghazi Hamad, who shared a prison cell with Deif, told the Financial Times. “He was very kind, all the time a patriot who would make little cartoons to make us laugh.”

But as soon as Deif was implicated in a string of suicide bombing strikes in 1996 that claimed more than 50 civilian lives, any glimmer of humanity vanished. He also contributed to the development of the organisation’s initial rockets, which today number in the thousands.

An Israeli officer who is familiar with the commander’s security dossier claimed that either Deif’s father or uncle participated in armed Palestinian operations into the same region of territory on Saturday.

Deif and other members of Hamas believe that the Oslo Accords, which made a fleeting promise of a negotiated peace settlement in the late 1990s, betrayed their resistance and the group’s original intent to have a Palestinian state take the place of Israel.

“Deif has tried to start the second war of Israeli independence,” said Eyal Rosen, a colonel in the Israeli army’s reserves who in a previous role concentrated on the Gaza Strip.

“The main goal is — by steps — to destroy Israel. This is one of the first steps — this is just the beginning.”

The bloodiest day of bloodshed in Israel since the Yom Kippur war fifty years ago took place on Saturday when gunmen from the Palestinian organisation Hamas rampaged across Israeli cities, killing hundreds of Israelis and fleeing with dozens of captives.

Deif, the man behind a long-running campaign against the Jewish state, declared in a broadcast on Hamas media that “today is the day of the greatest battle to end the last occupation on earth.” He urged Palestinians all over the world to take part in the battle.

Deif claimed that the attack on Saturday was in retaliation for the 16-year blockade of Gaza, Israeli raids inside West Bank cities over the previous year, violence at the disputed site of Al Aqsa in Jerusalem, which is revered by Jews as the Temple Mount, rising settler attacks against Palestinians, and the expansion of settlements.

‘Enough is enough,’ Deif, who does not appear in public, said in the recorded message.

He urged Palestinians from east Jerusalem to northern Israel to join the battle and said that the attack was just the beginning of what he named Operation Al-Aqsa Storm.

He added, “Today the people are regaining their revolution.”

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