Hamas’s military chief in Gaza, Izz ad-Din al-Haddad, made a series of operational mistakes in the months after the U.S.-brokered ceasefire that allowed Israeli intelligence to track and ultimately kill him in a strike on a Gaza City apartment, security sources told the Israeli news site Walla.

Haddad — known to Hamas operatives as “the Ghost” and described by Israeli officials as the last surviving senior architect of the October 7, 2023, massacre — was killed Friday in a precision strike on a residential building in Gaza City’s Rimal neighborhood. The IDF said three fighter jets dropped 13 munitions on the building and a vehicle that left the area moments later, killing Haddad along with his wife and a daughter, according to Hamas sources. Both of his sons had been killed in earlier Israeli strikes, in January and April of last year. Emergency services in Gaza put the total death toll at seven, with more than 50 wounded.

The killing came as U.S. peace envoy Nickolay Mladenov was working to advance the next phase of President Donald Trump’s post-war plan for Gaza, including efforts to demilitarize the Strip, transfer civil control from Hamas to a third party, and pull back IDF forces from Palestinian-controlled areas. Israeli officials said Haddad had been actively working to derail that process.

According to the defense sources cited by Walla, Haddad had for years moved almost exclusively through Hamas’s underground tunnel network, confiding his movements only to a tiny circle of aides. He survived multiple assassination attempts, dyed his hair and shaved much of his beard to alter his appearance, and reportedly surrounded himself at times with Israeli hostages to deter strikes.

The sources said Haddad was the Hamas figure who pushed at the last minute to accept the U.S.-mediated ceasefire that took effect in October, after realizing that IDF ground forces — operating under the aggressive posture set by Defense Minister Yisrael Katz — had encircled the heart of Gaza City, where he was hiding. He understood, the sources said, that if Hamas’s leadership rejected the deal, his own days were numbered and the military infrastructure the group had built since seizing Gaza from Fatah in 2007 risked collapse.

“He effectively pleaded for the ceasefire,” one defense official told Walla.

Even before the truce took hold, Haddad had begun violating the security rules he had set for himself, occasionally emerging from the tunnels into buildings to look outside. After the ceasefire, the discipline eroded further. With Israeli attention focused on the war with Iran and on the Lebanese front, Haddad was tempted above ground and began moving through the streets of Gaza in carefully chosen, limited appearances meant to project authority and signal that he feared neither Israeli intelligence nor the Israel Air Force.

Some Israeli officials, however, assessed that street theater was not his real motivation. After months underground, the sources said, Haddad was driven by a longing to see his wife and children — the same family members who were with him when he was killed. He had also continued to play a role in managing the Israeli civilian and military hostages still held in Gaza.

“He cracked under pressure,” a source familiar with the intelligence assessment told Walla, describing a pattern that has played out repeatedly in the Israeli campaign against Hamas’s senior ranks. Operatives who maintain strict communications and movement discipline tend to survive; those who break it, even briefly, are found.

Israeli Military Intelligence identified the windows of time in which Haddad was breaking his own rules, mapped his new movement patterns, and presented senior defense officials with strike opportunities carrying a high probability of success. The political-level approval to take the shot was given roughly ten days before the strike, according to Israeli media.

In the hours before the attack, the Air Force, under Maj. Gen. Omer Tischler, carried out a deception operation in the western Negev and Gazan airspace designed to keep Hamas’s military wing and Haddad’s inner circle on low alert.

At the same time he was making himself vulnerable, defense officials said, Haddad was building what one source described as “a well-oiled financial mechanism” inside Gaza, accumulating money, weapons, and influence as part of a broader project to rebuild Hamas’s military wing, tighten the link between Gaza and the West Bank, extend the range of Hamas attacks, restore the group’s standing on the Palestinian street, and block any diplomatic arrangement that could weaken it. Haddad received much of his policy direction from Khalil al-Hayya, the senior Hamas politician now considered a front-runner to take over the group’s overall political leadership.

He continued, throughout, to live as one of Israel’s most wanted men, distancing anyone within his orbit suspected of loyalty problems.

In the end, the strike found Haddad above ground, in a hideout apartment in Rimal, surrounded by family members. When people inside the building attempted to flee in vehicles, the IDF struck a second time, hitting the car to prevent the escape of his associates and any possibility that Haddad himself might survive.

Haddad had taken command of two regional commands and 14 battalions after the killing of Yahya Sinwar in October 2024, sharing effective control of Hamas with Mohammed Sinwar until the latter was killed by Israel in May 2025. From that point on, he was the sole commander of the Qassam Brigades, and, in the IDF’s assessment, the last senior figure still in place who had sat at the table when the October 7 attack was planned.

“In every conversation I held with the hostages who returned, the name of the arch-terrorist Izz ad-Din al-Haddad, one of the chief perpetrators of the October 7 massacre and the head of Hamas’s military wing, came up again and again,” IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir said in a statement confirming the kill. “Today, we succeeded in eliminating him.”

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