Mohammed Deif is commander of the military wing of the militant group Hamas, which carried out Saturday’s attack.
“In light of the continuing crimes against our people, in light of the orgy of occupation and its denial of international laws and resolutions, and in light of American and Western support, we’ve decided to put an end to all this,” said the speaker, filmed shrouded in shadows, “so that the enemy understands that he can no longer revel without being held to account.”
Hunted by Israel for decades, and almost killed in an air strike 20 years ago that reportedly left him in a wheelchair after losing an arm and a leg, Deif’s ability to outwit Israel’s military while killing soldiers and civilians alike has earned him the reverence of Palestinian militants.
In interviews, Israeli and Palestinian analysts, including people who knew Deif before he vanished into the shadows of Palestinian militancy, described a quiet, intense man uninterested in the internecine rivalries of Palestinian factions. Instead, they said, he was single-minded about changing the nature of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and using violence as a means to achieve it.
“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 focused 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.
His taste for theatrics was honed at an acting troupe he joined while at the Islamic University of Gaza, a hotbed of the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood’s style of political Islam. By the time Hamas was born in the late 1980s, forged in the fire of the first intifada, or uprising, against Israel’s occupation, Deif was in his 20s.Around that time, Ghazi Hamad, now a Hamas politburo member, shared a prison cell with Deif after they were jailed by the Israelis.
Deif is said to have studied under Yahya Ayyash, a bombmaker with the nickname “Engineer” who was assassinated by Israel in 1996 with a mobile phone packed with explosives.
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