Hamas commander Mohammed Deif has been assassinated in an airstrike, the Israeli military revealed today.
The news comes a day after group leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Iran in an airstrike.
‘IDF fighter jets struck in the area of Khan Yunis, and following an intelligence assessment, it can be confirmed that Mohammed Deif was eliminated in the strike,’ the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement today.
Deif is believed to have been responsible for planning and executing the bloody October 7 incursion into Israel, in which Hamas members and their allies killed some 1,200 Israelis and took some 240 hostage.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said the strike that killed Mr Deif was a ‘significant milestone’ toward achieving the goals of the war.
‘The results of this operation reflect that Hamas is an organisation in disintegration,’ he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Israel believes that Deif, the head of Hamas’s military, and Yahya Sinwar, the top Hamas leader in Gaza, were the chief architects of the October 7 attack.
Sinwar is believed to remain in hiding in Gaza.
The head of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, Deif had been among Israel’s most wanted men for nearly three decades and on a US list of ‘international terrorists’ since 2015.
Israel had reportedly tried to kill him at least eight times including in 2001, 2002, 2006, 2014, and in May 2021.
The attempts saw both of his legs and an arm blown off and his wife and two children killed.