On May 15, Israel eliminated Izz al-Din al-Haddad, better known inside Hamas as Abu Suhaib. The strike in Gaza City removed the terrorist organization’s most senior military commander with real operational authority inside the territory. With his death, Hamas has effectively lost the last figure capable of exercising unified battlefield control over its forces in Gaza.
Abu Suhaib was not an obscure militant operating in the shadows of the organization. He was one of Hamas’s founding members, a longtime brigade commander, and former head of the group’s internal security apparatus. Over the years, he survived at least six Israeli assassination attempts, earning the nickname “Ghost of al-Qassam.” After Mohammed Sinwar’s death in May 2025, Abu Suhaib assumed command of Hamas’s al Qassam Brigades in Gaza, overseeing an estimated 27,000 fighters and roughly 390 kilometers of tunnels concentrated in the northern sector.
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He was also directly tied to the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre. According to Israeli intelligence assessments, Abu Suhaib distributed written operational orders to Hamas battalion commanders the night before the assault that slaughtered 1,200 Israelis and resulted in the kidnapping of 251 people. During the war, he helped oversee Hamas’s hostage infrastructure and reportedly kept captives near him as human shields to complicate Israeli targeting operations.
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His elimination matters not only because of who he was, but because of what remains of Hamas after nearly three years of war. Israeli operations have already destroyed or severely degraded 23 of Hamas’s 24 battalions as organized fighting forces. Much of the group’s tunnel infrastructure has been rendered unusable, its logistics networks disrupted, and its command structure steadily dismantled.
The financial picture is equally devastating. Before the war, Hamas reportedly controlled roughly $700 million in cash reserves. During the conflict, the organization diverted hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid to finance tunnel construction, weapons procurement, and military operations. Monitoring data indicated that Hamas operatives looted or taxed the overwhelming majority of aid convoys entering Gaza. Abu Suhaib was deeply embedded in that system and remained a committed opponent of any postwar arrangement that would dismantle Hamas’s military power.
That placed him in direct opposition to the core requirements of President Donald Trump’s Gaza framework, which calls for Hamas’s disarmament, the destruction of its offensive infrastructure, and its permanent exclusion from governing Gaza. In October 2025, Abu Suhaib rejected those conditions outright, consistent with Hamas’s long-standing strategy of preserving enough military capability to sabotage stabilization efforts and perpetuate permanent conflict.
The United States has a direct strategic interest in Hamas’s continued degradation. Washington currently operates a Civil-Military Coordination Center in southern Israel to oversee the October 2025 ceasefire arrangements. Since that ceasefire began, repeated Hamas violations have contributed to continued violence inside Gaza against civilians and the anti-Hamas forces that operate inside the Strip. A commander with Abu Suhaib’s operational experience, ideological commitment, and authority represented an enduring threat both to ceasefire enforcement and to any serious demilitarization effort.
His death now breaks the final link in Hamas’s centralized military command inside Gaza. It further fragments the group’s ability to function as a coherent Iranian proxy and complicates efforts to coordinate attacks across multiple fronts. Hamas still possesses scattered cells, surviving operatives, and political figures. What it no longer possesses is a unified military structure capable of directing sustained, organized warfare from inside Gaza.
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For the U.S., Abu Suhaib’s removal reduces the danger to U.S. personnel involved in ceasefire oversight, weakens a key opponent of regional stabilization, and further dismantles the military apparatus responsible for the Oct. 7 massacre, systematic aid theft, and repeated ceasefire violations.
Hamas has not disappeared. But it has been decapitated.
Jose Lev Alvarez is an American–Israeli scholar specializing in Middle Eastern security policy. A multilingual veteran of the Israeli militia special forces and the U.S. Army, he holds three master’s degrees and is completing a Ph.D. in Intelligence and Global Security in the Washington, D.C., area.
