Deif is ‘fine’: Hamas rejects Israeli claims of military chief assassination

A senior member of Hamas has categorically dismissed Israeli reports on the assassination of the Palestinian resistance movement’s military leader, Mohammed Deif, in the occupying regime’s barbaric aggression on the besieged Gaza Strip.

Osama Hamdan, who represents the movement in Lebanon, made the assertion in an interview with the Associated Press (AP) published on Thursday.

Hamdan said Deif, the commander of al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, is "fine" after the Israeli officials and media outlets claimed he had been assassinated.

This is the first time a senior Hamas official has addressed the Israeli claim, first made on August 1, that the top Palestinian commander was killed in an airstrike last month.

Hamdan told AP that Hamas believes Israel mentioned Deif as the target of the July strike to "justify the massacre" that day, in which 88 Palestinians were killed in a bombing of the so-called humanitarian zone.

Deif is among the founders of al-Qassam Brigades in the 1990s and has led the force for more than 20 years.

Israel has identified Deif and Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s newly appointed head of political bureau, as the chief architects of the large-scale and surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the regime on October 7.

Sinwar was Hamas’s Gaza leader before he replaced Ismail Haniyeh who was killed in an Israeli attack in Tehran last month.

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

Deif is believed to have helped expand Hamas’s labyrinth of tunnels that run beneath Gaza, with the occupying regime describing the underground network as "highly complex."

Israel launched the aggression after Operation al-Aqsa Storm, a retaliatory operation staged by the Gaza-based resistance groups in reprisal for the regime's decades-long crimes against Palestinians.

The US-backed bloody onslaught has so far killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 92,294 others. Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under rubble.

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