IDF confirms: Hamas commander Mohammed Deif killed

On Tuesday, a statement said an “intelligence review” had confirmed the militant’s death. “Mohammed Deif has been eliminated,” the IDF wrote on X.

The announcement came less than 24 hours after Hamas confirmed the assassination of its political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. Although Israel refused to comment on the operation – in line with its stance of “strategic ambiguity” following previous high-profile attacks and assassinations in the region – it was widely seen as responsible.

A Hamas spokesman, Izzat al-Rishq, said in a statement on Thursday: “confirm or deny” The death of one of the group’s leaders was “a matter for the leadership” of Hamas’ military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades. “It is not possible to confirm any of the news published,” he said.

Analysts called the killings a major blow to Hamas but one from which it can recover. Overall, they said, the biggest short-term impact is likely to be the threat to negotiations to end the war, which had reportedly reached a critical turning point in the days before Haniyeh’s killing. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is under significant pressure from the United States, its main political and military ally, to find a negotiated solution to the conflict.

Gaza’s Health Ministry says more than 39,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli military operations to pursue Deif and the other perpetrators of the Oct. 7 attacks that sparked the war. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and fighters, but says the majority of the dead are women and children.

Israel believes Deif was a key figure in planning the attack in which Hamas-led militants killed about 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostage in southern Israel. Deif was the founder of the Qassam Brigades and its leader for more than two decades. He was long on Israel’s death list and survived at least seven assassination attempts, Israeli media reported.

He was attacked along with Salameh, the leader of Hamas forces in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, according to a joint statement by the Israeli military and Shin Bet, Israel’s intelligence agency, on July 14. Salameh was one of Deif’s “closest confidants” and also played a central role in planning the October 7 attack, the statement said.

Deif, whose real name was Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, was a shadowy figure who was rarely photographed or seen in public, but he helped oversee the construction of Gaza’s extensive tunnel network and is believed to have directed Hamas’s day-to-day fighting.

Political analysts described the deaths of Deif and Haniyeh as a major blow to the movement, but warned that previous killings of key figures had not significantly weakened the group. Israel killed a number of Hamas political and military figures in 2003. By the end of the following year, it had assassinated the group’s founder and Haniyeh’s mentor, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, as well as then-leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi.

“History has repeatedly shown that while Israel is very successful in assassinating senior Palestinian politicians, this has had, at best, a limited impact on (Hamas’s) capabilities and development,” Mouin Rabbani, a non-resident scholar at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies and co-editor of Jadaliyya, said of Haniyeh’s killing.

“I would not equate killing leaders with wiping out a movement. They are two very different things, and Israel has proven quite successful in the former but not at all in the latter.”

In May, International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Karim Khan announced that he had requested arrest warrants for Deif and Haniyeh, as well as for Hamas’ Gaza leader Yehiya Sinwar, who is said to run operations from the enclave’s extensive network of tunnels, and to charge all three with war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Netanyahu, against whom the prosecutor had also requested an arrest warrant, has promised to fight until Hamas is eliminated as a military and political force, although even his own generals have admitted that this goal is unrealistic.

“One way or another, we will reach every senior member of Hamas,” Netanyahu said after the July 13 attacks, adding that there were no hostages in the area at the time. It was unclear how that conclusion was reached.

Loveluck reported from Jerusalem and Rubin from Tel Aviv. Miriam Berger in Jerusalem contributed to this report.