Israel has killed multiple senior officials of the Hamas terror group and its regional allies since October 7, 2023, Hamas attack that triggered the war in Gaza.
On Tuesday, Israel struck a gathering of Hamas political leaders in Doha, Qatar, who were reportedly discussing the latest proposal for a hostage-ceasefire deal.
Hamas said in a statement that six people had been killed, but that all of the targeted senior officials survived.
From Gaza to Lebanon to Iran, Israel has killed Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iranian military leaders.
Here is a list of top officials who have been assassinated by Israel during the war:
The deputy political head of Hamas and a founder of the group’s military wing, Saleh al-Arouri was killed January 2, 2024, in a drone strike in a southern suburb of Beirut.
Arouri helped found the terror group’s military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and Israel accused him of orchestrating deadly attacks over the years.
Israeli intelligence officials believe that among numerous other attacks against civilians, Arouri helped plan the June 2014 kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens — Gil-ad Shaar, Eyal Yifrach and Naftali Fraenkel.
He served several terms in Israeli jails, and was released in March 2010 as part of efforts to reach a larger prisoner swap for Gilad Shalit, an IDF corporal kidnapped by Hamas in 2006.
An Israeli airstrike on a compound on the outskirts of Khan Younis in southern Gaza killed the head of Hamas’s military wing, Mohammed Deif, as well as senior commander Rafa’a Salameh, on July 13, 2024.
Hamas-controlled health authorities, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants, claimed over 90 people were killed in the strike.
Deif was believed to be one of the masterminds of the October 7 attack and a founder of the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing. He led suicide bombing campaigns against Israeli civilians and built up a formidable arsenal of rockets used to strike into Israel. For years, he topped Israel’s most-wanted list.
An Israeli airstrike on a southern suburb of Beirut killed Hezbollah’s top military commander, Fuad Shukr, on July 30, 2024. The secretive Shukr was in charge of Hezbollah’s forces in southern Lebanon and was a top official in its missile program.
Shukr, who was a member of Hezbollah’s top military body, the Jihad Council, was accused by the United States of planning and carrying out the truck bombing of a Marine Corps barracks in Beirut that killed 241 American service members. He was the first high-ranking Hezbollah leader to be killed.
The strike came almost a year into daily skirmishes with the terror group, which started firing rockets and drones at Israel, internally displacing some 60,000 Israelis, on October 8, 2023, a day after the Hamas invasion, in support of its ally in Gaza.
On July 31, 2024, just hours after the strike that killed Shukr, Hamas’s top political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed by a bomb that had been previously smuggled into a guesthouse in the Iranian capital of Tehran, where he had gone to attend the inauguration of Iran’s new president.
Israel had pledged to kill the 62-year-old Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders over the October 7 attack.
Israeli airstrikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs killed Hezbollah’s longtime leader and one of its founders, Hassan Nasrallah, on September 27, 2024.
An astute strategist, the 64-year-old Nasrallah cemented alliances with Shiite religious leaders in Iran and Palestinian terror groups such as Hamas. Under his leadership, Hezbollah fought wars against Israel and sided with President Bashar al-Assad during the conflict in neighboring Syria.
The deputy head of Hezbollah’s Central Council, Nabil Kaouk, was killed in an Israeli airstrike south of Beirut a day after Nasrallah. He joined the group in its early days in the 1980s.
Kaouk also served as Hezbollah’s military commander in south Lebanon from 1995 until 2010. He made several media appearances and gave speeches to supporters, including at funerals for Hezbollah fighters. He was seen as a potential successor to Nasrallah.
In September 2024, 11 days before he was killed, Kaouk was tapped by Hezbollah to lead the group’s investigation into Israel’s pager operation, which culminated in thousands of Hezbollah’s communications devices exploding at once, wounding thousands of operatives and killing some.
Israeli airstrikes on a Beirut suburb killed Hezbollah’s new leader, Hashem Safieddine, on October 3, 2024, days after he replaced his predecessor, Hassan Nasrallah.
A familiar face in Lebanon and a leader with close ties to Iran, he was a member of the group’s decision-making Shura Council and its Jihad Council, which acts as its military command. He also headed its Executive Council, which runs schools and social programs. Safieddine was a maternal cousin of Nasrallah.
Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in the Gaza Strip, who masterminded the October 7 attack on Israel — in which thousands of terrorists invaded from the Strip, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages — was killed by Israeli troops on October 16, 2024.
Israel arrested Gaza-born Sinwar — an early member of Hamas, which was formed in 1987 –in the late 1980s and he admitted to killing 12 suspected collaborators, a role that earned him the nickname “The Butcher of Khan Younis.” He was sentenced to four life terms for offenses that included the killing of two Israeli soldiers.
He survived brain cancer in 2008 after being treated by Israeli doctors, and was released from prison in 2011 along with some 1,000 other prisoners as part of an exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was captured by Hamas in a 2006 cross-border raid.
Israel had vowed to kill Sinwar since the October 7 attack on southern Israel that triggered the ongoing war, but his death finally came about in a chance encounter. Israeli soldiers killed him inside a building in the southern city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, not knowing his identity until after his body was found.
Muhammad Sinwar, believed to be the head of Hamas’s armed wing, was killed by an Israeli strike on May 13, 2025, in the Gaza Strip. He was the younger brother of Yahya Sinwar.
A wave of Israeli strikes on different parts of Iran killed several top officials with Iran’s military and the main paramilitary force on June 13, 2025. Among the high-level military officials killed was Gen. Hossein Salami, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
The strikes came amid a 12-day war with Iran, launched by Israel in response to what it characterized as an imminent, existential threat from the Islamic Republic’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
After extensive Israeli strikes killed Iran’s top nuclear scientists and took out much of its ballistic missile stores and production facilities, the US struck several of Iran’s underground nuclear sites, and then brokered a ceasefire.
The prime minister of the Houthi rebel-controlled government, Ahmed al-Rahawi, died in Israeli airstrikes on Yemen’s capital of Sanaa on August 28, 2025. He was the most senior Houthi official to be killed since an Israeli-US campaign against the Iran-backed group — with which Yemen’s internationally recognized government is at war — started earlier this year.
The Houthis — whose slogan calls for “Death to America, Death to Israel, [and] a Curse on the Jews” — started attacking Israel and maritime traffic in November 2023, a month after the Hamas-led attack on October 7.
Since then, the group has fired some 121 ballistic missiles, and dozens of attack drones and cruise missiles, at Israel, including one drone that killed a civilian and wounded several others in Tel Aviv in July 2024, prompting Israel’s first strike in Yemen.
It has also struck cargo ships that it claims have links to Israel, targeting over 100 merchant vessels with missiles and drones, seizing one vessel and sinking two, and killing four sailors. After seizing the Galaxy Leader ship, partly owned by an Israeli tycoon, it held the vessel’s crew, none of whom were Israeli, for over a year.
Israel said one of its airstrikes in Gaza on August 30, 2025, killed the longtime spokesperson for Hamas’s armed wing, whom it identified as Hudayfa Samir Abdallah al-Kahlout.
Israel had said that Kahlout, who was better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Obeida, was behind the release of videos showing hostages as well as footage of the Hamas-led attack that sparked the war.