Muhammad Deif transformed the militant group from a cluster of terror cells into a force capable of invading Israel.
A few hours after Hamas slaughtered hundreds of civilians in Israel on October 7th, the man who planned the attacks made a rare public appearance. A video broadcast on Hamas’s media channel showed a silhouette of the group’s military leader, Muhammad Deif, as a pre-recorded statement played in the background. His deep voice was strangely measured as he announced an unleashing of terror that would claim more than 1,400 lives.
Hamas is an Islamist organisation, but there was scant mention of religion in Deif’s address. He called for “brothers in the Islamic resistance in Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, Iraq and Syria” to join the fight, but ended by appealing to the non-Muslim people of the world to stage protests. Then he was gone, leaving horror in his wake.
No one alive is responsible for so many Israeli deaths as Deif. Aside from a stint of recuperation from war wounds he has led Hamas’s military wing since the mid-1990s, a rare constant in a leadership frequently disrupted by assassination. Under his command, Hamas’s tactics have become less amateurish and more devastating: first mass suicide-bombings, then the deployment of long-range missiles.
Now, wheelchair-bound and mutilated from assassination attempts, he has initiated an escalation that takes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into uncharted waters. His opponents within Hamas, who used to advocate engagement with Israel, have been emphatically sidelined. What happens next – the fate of more than 200 hostages in Gaza, how Hamas responds to Israel’s bloody aerial bombardment and anticipated ground invasion – depends to a large extent on the planning and calculations of one man. The stakes for Israel, the Palestinians and the wider region could scarcely be higher.
No one alive is responsible for so many Israeli deaths as Deif.
Yet hardly anything is known about Deif. For years, Western spies would respond to questions about him with a shrug. Only a handful of photographs have ever appeared in the media – grainy images from his youth. Some speculate that he died long ago and is nothing more than a mythical figurehead cultivated for propaganda purposes. Shlomi Eldar, an Israeli journalist who has interviewed many members of Hamas, reckons even Shin Bet has struggled to pin down details about him. The formidable Israeli intelligence agency “wouldn’t recognise him if they passed him on the street,” he said.
Deif is the Arabic word for “guest”, and the Hamas leader seems to have chosen the nom de guerre as a gesture to his lifestyle, which for more than two decades has involved shifting from place to place to evade his enemies. Muhammad Diab al-Nasri, as he was originally known, was born in 1965 in the Khan Younis refugee camp in southern Gaza. The Arab-Israeli war of 1948 resulted in more than 700,000 Palestinians being uprooted from their homes. Many ended up in the West Bank and Gaza, then under Jordanian and Egyptian control respectively. When Israel barred the Palestinians’ return, local authorities in the places to which they had fled crammed them into refugee camps.
Deif’s family had come from a hilltop above Jerusalem. By the time he was born they were living in tin shacks on the sand clustered around streams of raw sewage. When Deif was two their situation deteriorated further: Israel occupied the Gaza Strip during the six-day war of 1967, and the refugees living there came under direct military rule. Soldiers patrolling the camp in army jeeps would pick up young men they suspected of troublemaking.
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Nicolas Pelham is The Economist’s Middle East correspondent
Additional reporting by Gareth Browne
ILLUSTRATIONS: DEBORAH STEVENSON
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