Israel eliminates Hamas military chief, Hizbullah commander

FPI / August 2, 2024

In strikes just days apart, Israel's military says it eliminated one of the planners of Hamas's Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the top commander of the Hizbullah terrorist army.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Thursday that top Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif was killed in a July airstrike. Deif is believed to have been a key planner of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks that left 1,200 people dead and around 250 taken hostage

Israel said on Tuesday its forces had killed Fuad Shukr, a top commander with Lebanon-based Hizbullah, in an airstrike in Beirut.

Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in a mysterious strike just hours later in Teheran, an attack Iran blamed on Israel.

Deif, the most senior military leader of Hamas, was targeted on July 13 in a massive airstrike in which Israel dropped eight 2,000-pound bombs on western Khan Younis. The commander of Hamas’s Khan Younis brigade, Rafa Salama, also was killed in the strike, the Israeli military said.

"Israel’s military said it took precautions to limit civilian casualties. It acknowledged the area was surrounded by civilians, but said responsibility for civilian casualties lay with Deif and his fighters for seeking to hide among them," the Wall Street Journal reported.

Israel said it a brief window of opportunity to target Deif, one of Hamas’s most secretive commanders.

"Israel had made numerous attempts to kill Deif since 2002, which forced him to move between homes. Few people inside Hamas had even met him. He remained in the shadows over the past two decades, hiding from Israeli bombs and bullets. His real name wasn’t believed to be Deif, which in Arabic means 'guest' in reference to his nomadic lifestyle, but Mohammed al-Masri, according to the U.S. government, which designated him a terrorist," the Journal's report said.

Deif is considered to be responsible for the transformation of Hamas’s military wing from an insurgent militia into a capable fighting force, after becoming commander of the wing, known as the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, in the early 2000s. Through this position he rose to be one of the most influential Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip, second on Israel’s threat list behind Hamas’s Gaza chief, Yahya Sinwar.

Meanwhile, Hizbullah has confirmed that Shukr was killed in an Israeli air strike.

The Israeli military said Shukr had been the target of an "intelligence-based elimination" in response to a Hizbullah rocket attack that killed 12 children in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights on Saturday, which Israel said Shukr helped plan.

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