The man who created today’s Hamas

Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades is the military wing of Hamas and is al-Masri’s greatest weapon against Isreal. File pic/Getty Images

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, a media reprt 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," said Abusada. 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, said media reports.

Also read: Israel gave Gaza residents seven hours to leave unharmed

The tighter the Israeli and Egyptian control over Gaza's borders - the more Hamas (and other groups) developed military means to fight back. Karim von Hippel, director of the London-based Royal United Services Institute, says "they may have been planning this for years and thinking through what they can do, because everything else they have tried, hasn't worked". "But certainly this is not going to work either. I think this will spell the end of Hamas."

1996
the year Masri orchestrated suicide bombings in Tel Aviv

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