Tel Aviv (Brussels Morning Newspaper) – The Israeli defence forces claimed on Wednesday that they killed Mahmoud al-Aswad, the head of Hamas’ General Security Apparatus for West Gaza.
According to the military’s statement, last Friday, the Israeli Air Force struck and killed Mahmoud al-Aswad, Hamas’s General Security Apparatus leader in Gaza.
The Israel Defense Forces described Al-Aswad as a key player and a significant knowledge resource to Hamas. The IDF said its troops are operating on the outskirts of Gaza City and in Khan Younis, where they are working “to eliminate ‘terror infrastructure above & below-ground'” while focusing on also targeting the group’s fighters.
Since the beginning of the Israel-Palestine conflict with the shocking and unprecedented attack of Hamas on October 7, 2023, the IDF has been continuously executing military operations against Hamas command and fighters.
How many senior Hamas leaders have been killed so far?
Unconfirmed reports suggest more than 20 senior Hamas military and political leaders were killed between October 2023 and August 2025.
One of the most important killings by the IDF was the killing of Yahya Sinwar, the well-known Hamas leader in Gaza. Israeli forces killed him on October 16, 2024, in Rafah, a city in the southern Gaza Strip. The IDF claimed that Sinwar was killed in a firefight with IDF troops that had gone to complete their mission to locate and attack a group of Hamas fighters.
Also on May 13, 2025, Mohammed Sinwar, Hamas’s de facto military chief in Gaza, was killed in an Israeli strike. Both the IDF and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released statements confirming the death. Sinwar was a senior official running Hamas’s military activity. He was the brother of Yahya Sinwar.
In addition, in March 2025, Salah al-Bardawil, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, was reportedly killed in Israeli airstrikes in southern Gaza. The complexity of the fighting in southern Gaza was also considered to represent a higher intensity of hostilities and violence, and represented additional killings of Hamas’s political leadership.
