US Says Israel Agrees to Postpone Rafah Meeting: Live Updates

With his death, Mr. Issa, who was amongst Israel’s most wanted men, became a very powerful Hamas leader to be killed in Gaza because the war began. Israeli officials characterised the strike as a breakthrough of their campaign to annihilate the Hamas leadership in Gaza.

However, experts warned that his death – which Hamas has still not acknowledged – wouldn’t have a devastating impact on the armed group’s leadership structure. Israel has killed Hamas political and military leaders previously, but they were quickly replaced.

Here’s a better take a look at Mr. Issa and what his death means for Hamas and its leaders.

What was Mr. Issa’s role in Hamas?

Mr. Issa, who was 58 or 59 on the time of his death, had served since 2012 as deputy to Mohammed Deif, the elusive leader of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. Issa took up the position after the assassination of one other top commander, Ahmed al-Jabari.

Mr. Issa served on each Hamas’s military council and its political office in Gaza, overseen by Yahya Sinwar, the group’s most senior official within the enclave. Palestinian analysts and former Israeli security officials described Mr. Issa as a vital strategist who played a key role as a liaison between Hamas’s military and political leaders.

Salah al-Din al-Awawdeh, a Palestinian analyst with close ties to Hamas, described Mr. Issa’s position within the group as “part of the front row of the military wing leadership.”

Maj. Gen. Tamir Hayman, former head of Israel’s military intelligence, said Mr. Issa was concurrently Hamas’s “defense minister,” its deputy military commander and its “strategic mind.”

What does his death mean for the band?

Experts described Mr. Issa as a vital associate of Mr. Deif and Mr. Sinwar, although they said his death didn’t pose a threat to the group’s survival.

“There is always someone to fill in,” Mr. Awawdeh said. “I don’t think the murder of any member of the military wing will have an impact on its activities.”

Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli military intelligence officer and expert on Palestinian affairs, said Mr. Issa’s death was a serious blow to the Qassam Brigades, although he admitted it was not the “end of the world” for Hamas.

“He had a lot of experience,” Milshtein said. “His death is a great loss for Hamas, but it is not a loss that will lead to its collapse and will not affect it for a long time. They’ll get over it in a week or two.

Mr. Milshtein added that while Mr. Issa’s opinion was valued at the highest levels of Hamas, the fact that he did not directly command fighters meant that his death did not leave a huge gap in Hamas operations.

How was it described?

Mr. Issa was a lesser-known member of Hamas’s top leadership, keeping a low profile and rarely appearing in public.

Gerhard Conrad, a former German intelligence officer who met Mr. Issa more than a decade ago, described him as a “determined and quiet” person, lacking charisma. “He wasn’t very eloquent, but he knew what to say and got straight to the point,” Mr. Conrad said in an interview.

Conrad said he met with Mr. Issa, al-Jabari and Mahmoud al-Zahar, one other senior Hamas official, about 10 times in Gaza City between 2009 and 2011. The men met in an attempt to broker a prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas.

“He was a champion of inmate data,” Mr. Conrad said of Mr. Issa. “He had all the names to negotiate.”

However, Mr Conrad said it was obvious on the time that Mr Issa was a subordinate of Mr al-Jabari. “He was kind of like a chief of staff,” he said.

Mr. Issa’s importance only increased after Mr. al-Jabari’s murder, yet he continued to strive to remain out of sight. Few of Mr. Issa’s photos are in the general public domain.

The analyst, Mr. Awawdeh, called Mr. Issa a person who likes to “stay in the shadows” and infrequently gives interviews to the media.

IN one in every of the few interviews, Mr. Issa spoke in 2021 about his role within the indirect talks that resulted in Israel exchanging over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for one Israeli soldier, Sgt. First Class Gilad Shalit and his hopes for future conflict with Israel.

“Even if the enemy monitors the resistance in Palestine around the clock, it will catch them by surprise,” he told Al Jazeera on the time.

In a separate interview with a Hamas publication in 2005, Mr. Issa praised militants who attacked Israeli settlements and military bases, calling the actions “heroic” and “advanced operations.”

What is understood about his youth?

Mr. Issa was born in 1965 within the Bureij area of ​​central Gaza, but his family comes from what’s now Ashkelon, Israel.

According to Awawdeh, he was a member of Hamas for a long time and took part within the militant group’s efforts to go after Palestinians believed to be collaborating with Israel.

Mr. Issa has hung out in prisons run by each Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, said Mr. Issa helped plan the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7. Mr. Issa can be believed to have planned operations to infiltrate Israeli settlements through the second intifada within the 2000s, Milshtein said.