IDF increasingly certain Deif died in strike
Rafa’a Salameh, the commander of Hamas’s Khan Younis Brigade, was killed
The head of Hamas’s military wing Muhammad Deif (left) and Rafa’a Salameh, the commander of Hamas’s Khan Younis Brigade, in an undated photo.
The Israel Defense Forces increasingly believes that Muhammad Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, was killed in an airstrike in the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday, although as of Tuesday, it was still awaiting final confirmation before making a public announcement.
The IDF believed that its intelligence indicating that Deif arrived at a compound belonging to Rafa’a Salameh, the commander of Hamas’s Khan Younis Brigade, was highly accurate, and that the pair were together in the building that was targeted with several heavy munitions.
Salameh was killed in the strike, the IDF announced Sunday after obtaining final confirmation on the matter. It has yet to receive the same kind of information on Deif, and if he was dead, Hamas would attempt to hide the truth for some time.
According to IDF assessments described to The Times of Israel, military pressure exerted on Hamas caused Deif to venture out from the underground tunnels where he was thought to be hiding, and join Salameh, who had been at the compound for several weeks.
The military has also assessed that a very small number of civilians were harmed in the attack, despite its proximity to tent camps for displaced Palestinians in the Israeli-designated humanitarian zone.
Deif was one of the chief architects of the October 7 massacre in southern Israel, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists broke through the border, killed some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages. He has been one of the figures most wanted by Israel since 1995 for his involvement in the planning and execution of many terror attacks, including bus bombings in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Saturday’s strike was Israel’s eighth attempt to eliminate the shadowy terror leader, who survived multiple attempts on his life between 2001 and 2021. He was seriously injured in two of them.
Deif would be the most senior Hamas official in the Gaza Strip to be slain by Israel amid the ongoing war, after his deputy, Marwan Issa, was killed in an airstrike in March. Hamas’s deputy political leader, Salah al-Arouri, was assassinated by Israel in an airstrike in Lebanon’s capital Beirut in January.
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