Hamas said 71 people were killed and almost 300 were injured in the attack in Khan Younis – but Israel said unclear if Deif was among the dead
The Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif, who it has been reported was the target of an Israeli strike in Gaza, has previously been described as the “mastermind” of Hamas’s 7 October attack.
In this piece from November, the international security correspondent of the Guardian, Jason Burke wrote of Deif:
The exact role of different Hamas leaders in the attack is yet to be established, but it is clear that Sinwar and Deif were central to its planning.
Deif means “guest”, a reference to the 58-year-old’s constant relocation to avoid detection by Israel. A member of Hamas since his early 20s, the former science student oversaw a wave of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians in the early 1990s, and another a decade later. Deif may have been crippled by one of many Israeli assassination attempts, and his wife and young family were killed in an airstrike in 2014. Israeli officials have described Deif, whose real name is Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, as “a dead man walking”.