The 23-year-old son of Hamas’s chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya succumbed Thursday to wounds sustained in an Israeli strike on Gaza City on Wednesday, a hospital and senior Hamas official said.
Reports of Azzam al-Hayya’s death came as Hamas leaders were in Cairo to discuss the future of the ceasefire agreement they reached with Israel in October, after two years of war sparked by the Hamas-led onslaught of October 7, 2023.
On Wednesday, Al-Ahli Hospital and a security source said that a strike on Gaza City’s Daraj neighborhood that evening had killed one person and wounded 10 others, including the younger Hayya. He was confirmed dead Thursday by Shifa Hospital and Hamas official Basem Naim. Both Al-Ahli and Shifa hospitals are in Gaza City.
Al-Ahli Hospital also said Wednesday that it received three people killed and several wounded in an Israeli drone strike on Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood, and health officials said another man was killed in a strike near southern Gaza’s Rafah on Wednesday, according to health officials.
The man killed in Rafah was identified in Arabic media as the head of Khan Younis-area drug enforcement in the Hamas police, with a rank equivalent to colonel.
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On Thursday, Hamas also said three of its police officers were killed in an IDF strike on a “guard post belonging to a security headquarters” in western Gaza City, following Palestinian media reports of an Israeli attack in the area.
The IDF later confirmed carrying out a strike in the northern Gaza Strip, saying it hit Hamas gunmen who posed a threat to Israeli troops.
The strike had targeted a Hamas command center “while armed terrorists from the Hamas terror organization were operating inside it to advance and carry out terror attacks against IDF troops and Israeli civilians,” the military said.
The IDF says several armed Hamas operatives were killed in the strike.
#صورة| العقيد نسيم الكلزاني، مدير مكافحة المخدرات في شرطة خانيونس، الذي اغتاله الاحتلال بقصف مركبته في منطقة المواصي جنوب قطاع غزة. pic.twitter.com/22Jz93veh9
— المركز الفلسطيني للإعلام (@PalinfoAr) May 6, 2026
Separately, however, the military said that after an intelligence review, it could confirm that a Hamas terrorist whom it killed in Gaza last week had abducted Mia Schem during the October 7, 2023, onslaught.
On April 29, the IDF struck and killed Ibrahim Abu Sakkar, a Hamas operative and a paramedic in the terror group’s Military Medical Services, who the military said had planned an attack on troops “in the immediate timeframe” and during the war led numerous attacks on soldiers and Israel.
“Following intelligence analysis, it can be confirmed that the terrorist Abu Sakkar infiltrated Israeli territory during the brutal October 7 massacre and participated in the abduction of Mia Schem from the Mefalsim area,” the military said.
Schem, a partygoer at the Nova music festival, was returned to Israel in a hostage deal with Hamas in November 2023.
Hayya accuses Israel of seeking to pressure Hamas negotiators
Azzam is the fourth of Khalil al-Hayya’s seven sons to be killed in Israeli attacks, according to a Hamas source.
Two other sons were killed in past Israeli attempts on the elder Hayya’s life, in Gaza strikes in 2008 and 2014. Another son was killed in Israel’s botched assassination attempt on Hamas leaders in Doha in September 2025.
Khalil al-Hayya, who lives in Qatar, survived that attack, and is currently vying for Hamas’s leadership.
Speaking to Al Jazeera about the attack on his son, the elder Hayya accused Israel of trying to undermine mediators’ efforts to push ahead with US President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan.
“These Zionist attacks and violations clearly indicate that the occupation does not want to abide by a ceasefire or by the first phase,” Hayya said, speaking before his son’s death was announced.
Smoke rises from an explosion caused by an Israeli strike on Hamas leaders, in Doha, Qatar, on September 9, 2025. (UGC via AP)
The leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian factions held talks this week in Cairo with regional mediators and with Bulgarian diplomat Nickolay Mladenov, the lead envoy of the Trump-led Board of Peace that is supposed to oversee the Gaza truce, officials said.
The plan involves Israeli troops withdrawing from Gaza and reconstruction starting as Hamas lays down its weapons. But Hamas’s disarmament is a sticking point in talks to implement Trump’s plan in full.
A Hamas official told Reuters on Wednesday the Palestinian group told Mladenov it would not engage in serious talks on disarmament until Israel concludes obligations stemming from the first phase of the Gaza deal, including a complete halt to attacks.
A document obtained by The Times of Israel has shown that the Board of Peace does not intend to hold Israel to the terms of the October ceasefire if Hamas does not accept the international panel’s framework for the terror group’s disarmament.
At least 830 Palestinians have been killed since the October truce agreement, according to local medics, while Israel says gunmen have killed four of its soldiers over the same period.
Israel says its strikes are aimed at thwarting attempts by Hamas and other Palestinian terror operatives to stage attacks against its forces.
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