Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Mahmoud Marzouq Abu Watfa was born in the Al-Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City, on August 17, 1967, to a Palestinian refugee family originally from the depopulated village of Na'alia in the occupied Gaza district. He is married and has sixteen children. He completed his primary education in schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), his secondary education in Gaza City schools, and earned his high school diploma. He obtained a bachelor's degree in history from the Faculty of Arts at the Islamic University of Gaza, a master's degree in education from the same university, and a doctorate in education from the Faculty of Education at Ain Shams University in Cairo.
He worked as a lecturer at the Islamic University and at the College of Applied Sciences, before moving into security work, and being appointed Deputy Director of the Internal Security Service between (2010-2012), then Director of it, then Undersecretary of the Ministry of Interior in the Gaza Strip.
Abu Watfa joined the Islamic movement in his early youth, frequenting the Al-Radwan and Al-Nasr mosques. He participated in the advocacy, social, and institutional activities that the movement held in the Gaza Strip. He was one of the cadres of the advocacy apparatus that was supervised by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in the 1980s. At that time, Abu Watfa worked with Basem Issa and Imad Al-Alami, and participated in the first and second Palestinian intifadas. He worked with Ahmed Al-Jabari to form the movement’s popular army during the second Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000.
He contributed to developing the structure of the Qassam Brigades and transforming them from limited groups into an organized force with structure and discipline. He became the dean of its college and was one of the founding leaders of the Al-Radwan Battalion of the Qassam Brigades. He was also known as a link between the political leadership of Hamas, especially Yahya Sinwar, and the security and police institutions.
Abu Watfa suffered under the occupation, as he was arrested several times by the occupation intelligence, and was also detained in the prisons of the Palestinian Authority. He was subjected to torture, persecution, and repeated assassination attempts. It was remarkable that he continued to perform his police duties during the genocidal war launched by the occupation on the Gaza Strip in October 2023, despite the dangerous situation on the ground. He used to travel on a bicycle between the streets and neighborhoods to monitor the deployment of the police and ensure the arrival of aid to the people of Gaza.
His son, Salah al-Din, was martyred in the war of extermination on Gaza. The occupation bombed his house, but he survived. Then the occupation managed to assassinate him along with his wife and a number of his sons and daughters, by bombing his house in the al-Shanti area in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in Gaza City on March 18, 2025. Thus, the occupation declared the collapse of the ceasefire that had been reached between Hamas and the occupation in January 2025 before reaching its second phase. In the first three hours of the occupation army’s attack in which Abu Watfa was assassinated, 300 Palestinians were martyred, including a number of senior government officials, security officials, and leaders in Hamas, such as Issam al-Da’alis, head of government work follow-up, Ahmed al-Hatta, deputy minister of justice, Bahjat Abu Sultan, director of internal security, and Yasser Harb and Muhammad Daoud al-Jamasi, members of the Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip.
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