GAZA, Sept. 10 (Xinhuanet) -- Mahmoud Azzahar, a prominent Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) leader, survived on Wednesday an Israeli missile strike on Gaza City.

　　An Israeli F-16 warplane fired half a ton bomb at Azzahar's house at Sabra neighborhood in Gaza City. Although he was slightly injured, his son Khaled and one of his bodyguards were killed in the attack, which also wounded 20 others, including Azzahar himselfand his daughter-in-law.

　　Mahmoud Azzahar was born in Gaza City in 1945, where he is considered as one of the founders of the Islamic brotherhood movement in the Gaza Strip in the 1970s.

　　Right after he finished his high school in Gaza City, he went toEgypt to study medicine at Ein Shams University in Cairo in 1971, where he also got Masters degree in surgery from the same college in 1976.

　　He was the chairman of the Palestinians Doctors Association in the Gaza Strip in the early 1980s, which led the first general strike in Gaza against the Israeli military occupation's security measures.

　　Azzahar is married and has seven children, three boys and four girls. He educated his children to believe in the principles of thebrotherhood Muslims' Movement.

　　He was known as a good speaker, especially during the weekly traditional Friday prayers, in which Israel considered him as an inciter for violence against Israel.

　　He was detained by Israeli several times during the first Palestinian Intifada that began in December 1987 and ended in 1993.He was deported to south Lebanon in 1992 together with 425 Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders and militants.

　　After the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) was established in 1993, he was arrested several times by the PNA security forces. He spent once more than seven months in the Gaza Central jail controlled by the Palestinian military intelligence forces, the longest term he served.

　　Azzahar founded the Palestinian College of Nursing at the Islamic University, where he is still working as a teacher at the college.

　　He was a negotiator with Hamas delegation that held dialogue with the government of resigned Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, where both had reached a Hudna, or a truce agreement to end armed attacks against Israel for three months.

　　Azzahar was hiding following the suicide bombing attack in Jerusalem on Aug. 19 and Israeli targeted killing of his colleague Isma'el Abu Shanab in an Israeli Apache airstrike. Enditem