Al-Qassam General Commander Mohammed Al-Deif. Photo: Quds News Network.
By Yousef Fares – July 15, 2024
The military wings of the Palestinian resistance factions are reticent to release any information related to their martyrs, both leaders and personnel. This is not out of a desire to conceal their human losses, as is believed, but because the Zionist enemy is keen to carry out revenge attacks against the families of resistance fighters, whether the fighters are alive or martyred. It will track down and pursue their families with violent raids even if only children and women remain.
In light of this, everyone has come to believe that there are no significant losses among the resistance’s ranks of personnel and leaders. However, the reality known to those who have lived through this war is that the resistance suffers, on a daily basis, a large number of martyrs among its leaders and personnel. Some of those martyrs were successfully assassinated by the Zionist enemy from the air, while others ascended during field battles. Such losses could have created a vacuum and deteriorated the ability of the Al-Qassam Brigades to confront the enemy on the battlefield. This would be the case for regular armies, and even in the traditional scenario of resistance formations. However, the principle of flexibility in the military hierarchy of the Al-Qassam Brigades suits the conditions of the current war. This flexibility allows the organization to continuously absorb all blows against it and continue to effectively operate as if no one had been assassinated.
The day before yesterday, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came out celebrating the hypothesis that the enemy forces had managed to assassinate Mohammed Al-Deif, the general commander of the Al-Qassam Brigades. Al-Deif’s name has a special resonance in the Israeli public consciousness and haunts the entire Israeli security establishment.
Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, born in 1965, whom the occupation army’s chiefs of staff have failed to assassinate time and again since they began pursuing him in 1995, has become “the ghost with seven souls” as he is conventionally called in Hebrew media (referring to the number of times the enemy army has failed to kill him.) For them, he has become the “tipping point” that tilts the balance of victory in all battles and wars. Perhaps the Israeli prime minister desired to record an achievement of this magnitude in his career, giving him authorization to continue fighting or to stop it without paying the political cost that awaits him.
The Zionist intelligence agency Shin Bet, whose “golden intelligence” led to the massacre in Al-Mawasi, Khan Younis under the pretext of targeting Al-Deif, is focused on identifying and eliminating resistance leaders. In this context, the Shin Bet announced that it succeeded in assassinating Rafaa Salameh, the commander of the Khan Younis Brigade, while it could not confirm information about the fate of Al-Deif.
However, the number of assassination against military and resistance faction leaders during the war has showed that none of these operations succeeded in affecting the level of unity or escalation of the resistance in the field. Perhaps the clearest example of this is the North Gaza Governorate, where the Zionists succeeded in assassinating the commander of the Northern Brigade, Ahmed Al-Ghandour as well as the most prominent leaders of the Brigades and military specialists, such as Raafat Salman, Ayman Siyam, Wael Rajab, Ibrahim Biari, and Naseem Abu Ajina, most of whom were killed in the second month of the ground operation. The occupation army assumed that these assassinations had broken the spirit of the Northern Brigade and undermined its ability to keep fighting. However, the moment of truth was revealed during the ground incursion into Jabalia camp at the beginning of May, where the Zionist army admitted that that the Northern Brigade, which was supposed to have been defeated seven months ago, engaged it in some of the most intense fighting since the outbreak of the war.
The uniqueness of Al-Qassam
The military apparatus of the Hamas movement possesses a uniqueness with respect to the military arms of other resistance factions, as it has been able to maintain a large number of members from its founding generation, who have built up the Al-Qassam Brigades from the mid-1980s up through Al-Aqsa Flood. These individuals, who today hold positions of brigade commanders and military specialists, are all over 55 years old. Perhaps this large group of qualified cadres and leaders, who are all capable of leading operations on the front, explains the principle of “flexibility” that the spokesman for the Al-Qassam Brigades, Abu Obeida, spoke about in a previous speech.
It has also allowed the Al-Qassam Brigades to absorb all the concentrated assassination strikes against its military leadership in Gaza. Accordingly, whether Mohammed Al-Deif is assassinated or not will only have a symbolic effect on the battle. The enemy is the one in need of symbolic achievements to lift its morale, whereas the resistance realizes that its leaders, in front of its soldiers, are on the path of martyrdom.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/DZ/SC
Youssef Fares
Youssef Fares is a Palestinian writer and journalist from Gaza. Worked as a reporter for a number of international newspapers and channels. He specializes in resistance affairs. Currently he is an author at Al-Akhbar News and he regularly posts updates on his telegram channel.
