Gaza City on Thursday mourned the death of Azzam Khalil al-Hayya, son of the Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip and head of its negotiating delegation. He joins a list of family members who have been killed in successive clashes and wars.
Azzam succumbed to injuries sustained in an Israeli airstrike that targeted him in the al-Daraj neighborhood, east of Gaza City, on Thursday night.
This attack comes at a sensitive time in the negotiations between Hamas and Israel, mediated by intermediaries, and underscores the cost of confrontation borne by the leadership and the civilian population in the Gaza Strip.
With this, the number of sons of the prominent Hamas leader who have been killed rises to four: Osama, Hamza, Hammam, and Azzam. Only one of his sons, Izz al-Din, remains alive, having been wounded in an Israeli airstrike on the Tuffah neighborhood in April 2025.
His son Hamza (a member of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas) was killed on February 28, 2008, by a missile fired from an Israeli reconnaissance aircraft east of Gaza City. His older brother Osama followed him, killed along with his wife and three of his children in an airstrike that targeted their home during the 2014 Israeli war on the Gaza Strip.
During the most recent war, his son Hammam was killed on September 9, 2025, in an Israeli airstrike that targeted the residence of the Hamas negotiating delegation in Doha, Qatar.
In 2007, Haniyeh survived an assassination attempt when an Israeli airstrike targeted his family’s meeting place, killing seven people: two of his brothers, four of his nephews, and one of his cousins. One of his grandsons was also killed in early April 2025 in an Israeli bombing that targeted a school in the Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City.
