For weeks, top Israeli security officials closely watched a “palm-tree dotted villa in southern Gaza for weeks” where a top Hamas official, Rafa’a Salameh, the commander of Hamas’s Khan Younis Brigade, was believed to be staying, three senior Israeli defense officials told the New York Times.
However, the IDF refrained from carrying out a strike in the hope of catching a bigger fish, Hamas No. 2 leader Muhammad Deif, the head of Hamas’ military wing. IDF officials were fairly confident that Deif would join Salameh as health problems made it difficult for him to spend prolonged periods of time in the dark and airless tunnels.
Once the IDF received intelligence on Friday indicating that Deif had arrived at the villa, the strike was carried out – destroying the villa and killing dozens of terrorists.
The IDF confirmed Salameh’s death on Sunday but there has been no confirmation yet of Deif’s death, who has eluded death many times, surviving at least seven attempts by Israel to assassinate him since 2001.
However, the IDF believes that Deif was killed but Hamas will do its best to conceal his death. Middle East analyst Avi Issacharoff wrote in a Ynet report that if Deif was indeed killed, his death is “a crushing blow to Hamas and one of the most significant events in the war since it began more than nine months ago.”
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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4 Responses
Like makas tzfardaya when you killed 1 frog more came out so the same by hamas
The problem is that like makas tzfardaya, when you kill one, ten more are born…
typical of nyt’s pompous style, everybody is a “senior” or “top” official. even when they’re describing a surveillance operation, lasting many weeks, it was no mere underling doing their job. it’s just a silly way of making their report seem important, and is at best, lousy journalism. but it fills in the gaps on a slow news day, when there isn’t much they can vilify israel for.
@kalte litvak: this is more like a plague of mosquitoes – everyone knows that the real solution is to drain the swamp, but in the meantime, you also have to keep swatting the individual mosquitoes, or you’ll get bitten to death.