Israel, again, tries to kill Muhammad Deif, Hamas military leader

After the 1993 Oslo Agreement, Israel tried to persuade Yasser Arafat to imprison Deif, but Arafat believed that using terror against Israel, even while implementing the Oslo Agreement, would pressure Israel to make more concessions, and refused to do so.

Between 1996 and 2002, Deif was behind some of the more spectacular attacks on Israel, many of them involving blowing buses by placing suicide bombers on them.

Deif survived four earlier attempts by Israel to kill him. The three notable ones:

• The first attack was a missile attack on his car on 27 September 2002.
• He escaped a second missile attack on his car, on 21 October 2004, but his senior assistant, Adnan al-Ghoul, was killed in the attack.
• In the early morning hours of 12 July 2006, Israeli aircraft destroyed the third floor of a house in which high-level Hamas leaders were meeting. The initial plan called for dropping a one-ton bomb on the house in order to destroy it. The house was located in a densely built area, and a one-ton bomb would have likely destroyed several neighboring building, so the decision was to use a smaller bomb to destroy only the third floor, where the meeting was to take place. The Hamas leaders, at the last minute, decided to meet on the first floor of the building, and survived the more limited attack on the empty third floor.

Deif survived the attempts on his life, but not without serious injuries. He is blind in one eye and partially deaf. In the 2004 attack he lost one leg and severely injured his spine, making him partially paralyzed and confining him to a wheel-chair.

Qatar
Deif is one of the more extreme Hamas leaders, and so is Khaled Mashal, who lives and operates out of Qatar. The usually reliable London-based, Arabic language newspaper Al Hayat reported yesterday that Qatar threatened Hamas that if it – Hamas – accepted the Egyptian cease-fire proposal, Qatar would stop its financial aid to Hamas and expel Mashal from Qatar.

Al Hayat notes that Qatar has been actively undermining the Egyptian-sponsored cease-fire process since the beginning.

Qatar is nominally a U.S. ally – it hosts the largest U.S. naval base in the region – but it is a bitter enemy of two other U.S. allies in the region — Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Qatar, an oil-rich sheikhdom of 250,000 people, has been trying to fashion for itself a leadership role in the Arab world. Since its population and territory are too small to compete with the likes of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the small sheikhdom has chosen another path:

It has been funding the most extreme Jihadist movements in the region – in Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq. It has also been the main financial supporter of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoot, Hamas.

At the same time, it has been, relative to other Sunni states, closer to Iran, helping Iran evade some of the economic sanctions imposed on it for its illicit nuclear activities.

The Qatari royal family has also launched Al Jazeera, a TV station which, in its Arabic language broadcasts, devotes an inordinate amount of coverage to a populist, no-holds-barred reporting on the alleged misdeeds of regime the Qatari family is at war with, with the prime example being the Sisi regime (and, earlier, the Mubarak regime) in Egypt. Unlike tis global English-language broadcasts, Al Jazeera’s Arabic language version does not observe basic journalistic tenets such as not showing the mutilated bodies of small children. This is done in order to inflame emotions in the Arab street against regimes such as those of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.