Who was Mohammad Deif, the hero of the Palestinians?

Abu Ubaydah emphasized: After the martyrdom of the commanders, our fighters fought more courageously than before and their motivation for the battle doubled. We fight according to belief, and for every commander who is martyred, a thousand other commanders take his place.
Mohammad Deif was martyred while he left behind a rich history of presence in the Palestinian military arena, and his role in this arena was completely remembered.
Birth and Beginnings
"Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri", known as "Mohammed Deif", was born in 1965 in the Khan Yunis refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip, to a family that had emigrated from the occupied territories in 1948 and settled in the Khan Yunis camp.
His father worked in the field of pillow and quilt production. Mohammed completed his primary, middle and high school education, like other Palestinian refugees, in schools in the Khan Yunis camp.
He received a bachelor's degree in biology from the Islamic University of Gaza in 1988 and worked alongside his father in the field of spinning and weaving. He was a driver for a while and sometimes stopped studying to help his family.
He rarely spoke or appeared, for which reason he was called Al-Dhaif or the Guest, as he was pursued by the enemy and would not stay in one place for more than a day.
Joining Hamas
Mohammed Deif joined Hamas as a teenager and was an active member of it, participating in the activities of the Great Intifada - which began in late 1987 - and was arrested in the summer of 1989 on charges of joining the military wing of Hamas, founded by Sheikh Salah Shehadeh (martyred in the summer of 2002).
This organization was called "Hamas Mujahideen" at the time, and later its name was changed to "Qassam Brigades".
Deif remained in prison for a year and a half until the Israeli regime released him in 1991 to join the initial cells of the Qassam Brigades, through which the military structure of Hamas was formed.
After the assassination of "Imad Aql", who played a prominent role in the martyrdom operations of November 1993, Deif's role became more prominent and he was given the responsibility of commanding the Qassam Brigades.
He played a major role in planning the operation to capture the Zionist soldier Nachshon Waxman in 1994, who was captured in the town of Bir Nabala near Jerusalem, but after his whereabouts and those who captured him were revealed, they were all killed together.
However, Deif appeared in public holding Waxman's rifle and his identification card around his neck, covering his face with a red headscarf.
Deif also played an important role in transferring engineer Yahya Ayyash, an explosives expert, from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip after the siege against him in the West Bank was tightened, so that his experience in producing explosives could be used.
Yahya Ayyash was also assassinated in 1996 by a bombed phone, but Deif did not leave his assassination unanswered and sent "Hassan Salameh" to the West Bank, where he killed nearly 60 Zionists during a resistance operation under his command.
Deif completely disappeared from sight after this revenge operation in the spring of 1996 until the Palestinian Authority arrested him on the pretext of supporting him against the Israeli regime's bombings, but during this time he allowed US intelligence interrogators to question him.
Nevertheless, he was later released from the Gaza Security Service prisons and returned to the embrace of the Qassam Brigades, preparing himself to carry out further operations until the Al-Aqsa Intifada began in September 2000.
Upon the release of Sheikh Salah Shehadeh in 2001, Deif handed over the command of the military branch to him, and Shehadeh put him in charge of the military industries of the Qassam Brigades, which he was able to develop well.
A year after the start of the intifada, Deif was subjected to his first assassination attempt. He was with his friend Adnan Ghol, an explosives expert in the Qassam Brigades (who was martyred in 2004), and his son Bilal, when an Israeli fighter jet fired a missile at the town of Jahr al-Dik, but they miraculously survived the operation, and only Bilal, Adnan Ghol's son, was martyred.
Command of the Military Branch
After the martyrdom of Shahadah in the summer of 2002, the Hamas leadership once again put Deif in charge of the military branch of the movement, and three months later he was subjected to a second assassination operation, in which his car was bombed in the Sheikh neighborhood, killing two of his bodyguards and seriously wounding him, but he survived the operation unharmed.
Palestinian sources announced in the summer of 2006 that Deif had been subjected to assassination for the third time.
At that time, the Hamas movement had captured a Zionist soldier named Gilad Shalit, and in response, the Zionist regime bombed one of his houses, and it was said that Deif was seriously wounded in the process, but the Qassam Brigades did not confirm this news.
His wife, infant son, and 3-year-old daughter were killed in an assassination attempt in 2014, but he survived.
He played a significant role in developing Hamas' tunnel network in Gaza and was involved in bomb making. Due to previous assassination attempts, he lost an eye and suffered serious damage to one of his legs.
Command of Operation Storm Al-Aqsa
On October 7, 2023, Dhaif announced the start of the Battle of Storm Al-Aqsa and was responsible for overseeing the implementation of this operation, while also playing a role on the battlefield until he achieved the honor of martyrdom.
Just hours after the dawn raid into Israel that day, Deif delivered a rare audio message proclaiming the start of the operation called "The al-Aqsa Flood" and called on Palestinians in Israel to "expel the occupiers and demolish the walls”.