Gaza
Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, is known as ‘El Deif’ or the Guest, because, for decades, he has stayed in different houses every night to avoid being tracked, and killed, by Israel and he is now in charge of the militant group’s military wing, the Al Qassem Brigades, the media reported. Thought to have been born in the 1960s, El Deif is little known to ordinary Palestinians quoted Mkhaimar Abusada, a professor of political science at Al Azah University in Gaza, as saying. He’s very much like a ghost to the majority of the Palestinians, he said. The Al Qassem Brigades were opposed to the peace process embraced by Yassir Arafat, then-leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the 1993 Oslo Accords that were supposed to pave the way to a two-state solution of a new Palestine living in peace alongside Israel. In 1996, El Deif, an accomplished bomb maker, was behind a wave of four suicide attacks that killed 65 people in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and other outrages intended to derail the peace process. The tighter the Israeli and Egyptian control over Gaza’s borders – the more Hamas (and other groups) developed military means to fight back. Chief among them is rockets. Primitive at first, the missiles have been improved and refined over years of help from Iran. The Tehran theocracy, also dedicated to the eradication of the Jewish state, trained engineers, organised technology transfers and guided developments to create rockets capable of hitting Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Men like El Deif, the bomb makers and decision takers, were hunted by Israel. In 2014, an air strike killed his wife and daughter. He lost part of an arm, a leg and his hearing. No doubt his hatred for Israel intensified.
