Israel said it killed Hamas’s military leader in Gaza, eliminating a long-sought target as it continues to hunt down militants linked to the Oct. 7, 2023, attack despite a continuing cease-fire.
Ezzedin al-Haddad, a Hamas veteran who took over as military commander after his predecessor was killed, died Friday evening in an airstrike in Gaza City, Israel said. He had helped plan the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel that left 1,200 dead and around 250 as hostages in Gaza, and Israel said he was working to rebuild the group’s military capabilities when he was killed.
Israel said it sent warplanes to strike Haddad shortly after turning up intelligence on his location. Witnesses in Gaza City said they heard loud explosions in Al-Rimal neighborhood around 8 p.m. local time.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military was carrying out its policy of acting pre-emptively against threats.
It wasn’t clear how many people were killed in the operation. Palestinian health authorities said 13 people were killed and 57 injured in Gaza in the past 48 hours, without saying how many were combatants.
Haddad was known as the Ghost of al-Qassam for his low profile and survived several Israeli assassination attempts.
In addition to helping plan the Oct. 7 attacks, he recruited fighters and oversaw the captivity of Israeli hostages during the subsequent fighting, meeting them in person and keeping photos of many on his phone, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
A day before Oct. 7, Haddad held a secret meeting with Hamas commanders and handed them a document with instructions for the coming operation, including the mass abduction of Israeli soldiers.
Both of his sons were killed last year in the war.
The Hamas commander joined the group in its early years and worked his way up through its military Al-Qassam Brigades, leading bigger and bigger groups of fighters before climbing to the top, the Journal has reported. He also served in al-Majd, the internal security force that rooted out collaborators and spies.
When Haddad took over as Gaza military chief in the spring of 2025, he was the group’s third Gaza boss in just seven months, after Israel killed the brothers Yahya and Mohammed Sinwar. Of the dozen and a half senior militants on Hamas’s military council before the war, Haddad was one of a very few left alive.
He took over a sharply diminished operation and set out to rebuild its ranks, attracting thousands of recruits, though they were poorly trained and equipped. The group has resisted pressure to disarm and continues to assert its authority over the roughly 40% of Gaza that isn’t under Israeli military control.
Nickolay Mladenov, the Gaza high representative for President Trump’s Board of Peace, said this week that Hamas’s failure to disarm had stymied progress on a peace deal and that the group was taxing Gazans and blocking contractors from building temporary shelter for the population.
“It is in plain sight for all of us,” Mladenov said. “In the areas that it still controls. Hamas is consolidating its grip on the population.”
Hamas has denied the allegations.
Israel’s military says it has killed thousands of rank-and-file Hamas fighters and destroyed much of the group’s arsenal. It continues to conduct regular strikes against people who approach the dividing line between the two areas of control or who it says posed a threat.