The Israeli army carried out airstrikes on the al-Mawasi area in southern Gaza on Saturday. Nearly 100 people were killed, and the target of the attack was the leader of Hamas, Mohammed Deif, which was already known. However, he was not killed.
Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, and Rafa’a Salameh, the commander of Hamas’s Khan Younis Brigade, were the targets of this airstrike, the IDF confirmed earlier.
However, the IDF does not have information that they were killed in the attack. On the other hand, 90 people were killed – officially – while hundreds were wounded.
Deif, 58, who has been on Israel’s most wanted list since 1995 and has escaped multiple assassination attempts, is believed to be the mastermind of the October 7, 2023 attack.
A military official later said they were “still verifying and confirming the result of the attack,” and did not deny it took place inside an area the Israeli military has designated as safe for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also spoke about this attack, threatening that, “one way or another, it will reach the top of Hamas.”
Gaza’s health ministry said on Saturday that an Israeli attack on a displaced persons camp in Khan Younis killed at least 90 Palestinians and injured 289. Residents said they witnessed at least five “large warplanes bombarding the middle of the Al Mawasi area, west by Khan Younis”.
Most of the injured were transferred to Nasser Hospital. However, according to officials and medics, the facility “can no longer function” because the doctors are “overwhelmed by the large number of casualties”.
Unseen in public for years, Deif, known as “the guest”, frequently changed locations to avoid Israeli detection. Involved with Hamas from an early age, the former science student organized a series of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians in the 1990s and then again a decade later, according to the Guardian.
Speculation suggests that Deif may have been incapacitated in one of a number of Israeli assassination attempts, and that his wife and young children were killed in an airstrike in 2014.
Israeli authorities refer to him as the “dead man walking”, and there are reports that his real name is Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh accused Netanyahu on Saturday of trying to block a ceasefire in the Gaza war with “heinous massacres”, The Guardian reports.
