Hamas Confirms the Death of Five Senior Al-Qassam Commanders, Including Mohammed Deif

Israel considers Mohammed Deif, who has survived multiple assassination attempts, the mastermind behind the "Al-Aqsa Flood" operation.

31st January 2025

2 minutes read

Hamas Confirms the Death of Five Senior Al-Qassam Commanders, Including Mohammed Deif

The Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, announced on Thursday evening that their supreme commander, Mohammed Deif, had been killed alongside four other top leaders during the war between Israel and the movement in Gaza.

In a video statement, Al-Qassam Brigades spokesman Abu Obeida said, “We mourn the martyrdom of the great leader of the nation, Commander Mohammed Deif, Chief of Staff of the Al-Qassam Brigades, along with Commander Marwan Issa, Deputy Chief of Staff, Commander Ghazi Abu Tamaa, Head of Weapons and Combat Services, Commander Raed Thabet, Head of Human Resources, and the heroic Commander Raafat Salama, Leader of the Khan Younis Brigade.”

The Israeli army had announced in early August that it had killed Deif in a strike carried out about three weeks earlier, but Hamas only confirmed his death on Thursday.

The Israeli military accuses Deif of “leading, planning, and executing” the unprecedented attack launched by Hamas from Gaza against southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

Deif became the leader of the Al-Qassam Brigades in 2002. He had been one of Israel’s most-wanted men for nearly three decades and had been on the U.S. list of “international terrorists” since 2015.

Born in 1965 in the Khan Younis refugee camp in southern Gaza, Deif appeared in videos either masked or as a silhouette, with only a few rare photos of him ever published.

In January 2024, Israel released an image of him showing him missing an eye, without specifying when the picture was taken. His enemies dubbed him “the cat with nine lives” due to his repeated survival from assassination attempts.

In 2014, an Israeli strike killed his wife and his seven-month-old son at the time. Deif is believed to have played a key role in building Hamas’s extensive underground tunnel network beneath Gaza.

In May 2024, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court requested an arrest warrant for Deif, along with Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Sinwar, considered the mastermind of the October 7, 2023 attack, was killed on October 16, 2024, in an Israeli military operation. Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s political bureau, was also killed in late July last year in Tehran in an explosion that Israel later claimed responsibility for.