On December 3, 2023, IDF announced the elimination of al-Shati Battalion commander Haytham al-Khawajri. However, this past Saturday, he appeared at the "release ceremony" for Keith Siegel, photographed himself with "his soldiers," and roamed freely without attempting to conceal his identity.
This marks at least the third instance where a senior Hamas commander, whom Israel had claimed to have eliminated, reappeared later. The IDF and Shin Bet admitted the embarrassing mistake, explaining that their earlier announcement was based on intelligence that has now been proven inaccurate.
Israeli hostages Yarden Bibas, Ofer Calderon and Keith Siegel freed from Hamas captivity
(Video: Amit Berkovitch)
This incident follows footage from last month showing the commander of Hamas' Beit Hanoun Battalion, Hussein Fayyad, attending a funeral in northern Gaza. This occurred after IDF claimed he had been eliminated in Jabaliya in May. At the time, the IDF reported Fayyad was responsible for numerous anti-tank missile operations launched into Israeli territory during the war, as well as mortar fire targeting northern border communities.
At the funeral, Fayyad spoke about "Gaza’s victory over the IDF in the war." His statements confirm the footage was recent and filmed after the cease-fire. The reappearance of the Beit Hanoun Battalion commander—one of Hamas’ weaker battalions—again forced the IDF and Shin Bet to admit they were mistaken and that the intelligence about his death in an Air Force strike was incorrect.
A similar incident occurred with the commander of Rafah’s Tel al-Sultan neighborhood, Mahmoud Hamdan, who also served as a bodyguard for slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Hamdan was reportedly killed in a skirmish with IDF troops about 220 yards from the location where the Hamas leader himself was killed in September 2024.
The IDF had announced that Hamdan and the rest of the Tel al-Sultan Battalion’s leadership were eliminated in an Air Force strike. However, following Sinwar’s elimination, it became clear that this intelligence was inaccurate, as Hamdan survived until he was killed in another confrontation later.
"There’s a chance we’ll see more Hamas commanders we thought we had eliminated suddenly reappear," admit security officials. "Sometimes even Hamas itself doesn’t know the outcome of an attack targeting one of their commanders, and the process of evaluating strike results is not always 100% accurate. Some were targeted inside tunnels or buildings that collapsed on their occupants."
The IDF officially announced throughout the war that over 100 senior Hamas commanders had been eliminated. These included company, battalion and brigade commanders, as well as top organizational leaders like Mohammed Deif, Marwan Issa and Yahya Sinwar, who was killed in a clash with Israeli infantry and armored forces in Rafah.
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Despite the intelligence lapses revealed in the past month, Hamas still retains senior commanders across Gaza who play a key role in rebuilding the organization, which continues to rule Gaza in the absence of an alternative. Besides Mohammed Sinwar, who likely replaced his brother as Hamas leader, other prominent field commanders remain alive, including at least two brigade commanders: Mohammed Shabana of Rafah and Izz al-Din Haddad of Gaza City.
It is reasonable to assume that the higher the rank of the commander, the more resources—including extensive bomb payloads and intelligence efforts—are invested to ensure their elimination. In this context, Israel has been cautious about immediately announcing the results of targeted strikes on senior Hamas or Hezbollah commanders. Often, days or even weeks pass before the verification process is complete, as both terror organizations deliberately delay confirming whether their commanders have been killed.
At the same time, many IDF commanders criticized the seemingly astronomical numbers of terrorists, including field commanders, that security officials claimed had been eliminated during the war. “The public was told that a brigade-level combat team eliminated around 60 terrorists in Beit Lahia within a week or 150 in Shijaiyah, for example, without full verification. Battalion and brigade commanders, when you speak with them, are honest enough to add a disclaimer: ‘Of those, X were confirmed killed by sight, and the rest are based on informed estimates,’” IDF sources recalled from the war.
"There were also cases of Gazans, including many unarmed civilians, running in the streets or in combat zones where civilians were not supposed to be. We fired at them, hit them and saw them fall from afar, assuming they were terrorists. These were added to the daily enemy casualty assessment under the ‘neutralized’ category—without anyone verifying who they were, or even whether they were killed or only wounded."
Regardless, Israeli officials acknowledge that by the time the cease-fire began, Hamas still had at least 10,000 armed operatives remaining out of the approximately 30,000 it had on October 7. Among them are commanders, in addition to the hundreds of new operatives who were hastily recruited and trained in recent weeks.