Hamas says military chief Deif is doing well after Israeli attack in southern Gaza Strip

A senior official of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas says the group’s military commander, Mohammed Deif, is “fine” despite an apparent Israeli attempt to assassinate him in an attack on the al-Mawasi camp in the southern Gaza Strip.

“Commander Mohammed Deif is directly and closely monitoring military operations against Israeli forces,” the unnamed Hamas official told AFP news agency on Sunday.

On Saturday, the Israeli military attacked a designated humanitarian safe zone in the al-Mawasi camp in the south of the Gaza Strip. At least 90 Palestinians were killed and 300 others injured. The attack was the deadliest in Gaza in weeks.

Israel said the target of the attack in al-Mawasi was Deif, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was not sure whether the Hamas commander had been killed.

Hamas dismissed the background to the attack as “false” and said that “defenseless civilians” were killed in the airstrike.

Deif was one of the founders of Hamas’ military wing, the Izz al-Qassam Brigades, in the 1990s and led the force for more than 20 years.

Israel has identified him and Hamas Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar as the main architects of the large-scale and surprise Operation Storm Al-Aqsa against the regime on October 7.

Deif has not been seen in public for years and there are only a handful of photos of him on the Internet.

The senior Hamas military commander became head of the Qassam Brigades in 2002 after Israel killed his predecessor, Salah Shahada.

It is believed that he was involved in the expansion of Hamas’s labyrinth of tunnels under Gaza.

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