• Defeats veteran Khaled Meshaal; secret election held amid ongoing Israeli assassination campaign
• Gaza truce negotiator to formally assume post next week; five-member leadership council to be dissolved
• Al-Qassam Brigades declare full support

GAZA CITY: The Palestinian movement Hamas announced on Monday that it has elected Khalil al-Hayya, the group’s lead negotiator in indirect ceasefire talks with arch-foe Israel, as the new head of its political bureau.

For months, the veteran Hamas leader has spearheaded efforts to halt the ongoing war in Gaza. He now officially succeeds Yahya Sinwar, whom Israel accused of being one of the principal architects of the Oct 7, 2023, raids. Sinwar was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza a year later.

“The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) announces the election of brother mujahid Khalil al-Hayya as head of the movement’s political bureau, succeeding the martyred leader Yahya al-Sinwar,” Hamas said in a statement.

In the leadership contest, al-Hayya defeated former Hamas chief and long-time veteran leader Khaled Meshaal.

“Khalil al-Hayya was elected by an overwhelming majority,” a senior Hamas official told AFP, adding that the new chief is expected to formally assume the role next week.

A source in Hamas noted that the vote required extreme caution. “The election process was conducted through a highly complex and secretive mechanism because of the difficult security situation and the occupation’s assassination of several political and military leaders,” the source said.

Since Sinwar’s death, Hamas has been led by a five-member leadership council headed by senior official Mohammed Darwish. A senior Hamas official said the current council will soon be dissolved, with its members submitting their resignations to the group’s Shura Council.

“The political bureau will meet in Istanbul within days to form committees and begin restructuring Hamas’s leadership bodies,” the official added. Representatives of Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, also declared their “full support” for al-Hayya.

A former official from the Muslim Brotherhood and one of the founders of Hamas, al-Hayya is viewed by some as a moderate. From Qatar and Turkey, the tall and bearded leader will command Hamas, including operations in Gaza, where the movement still controls large swathes of the territory along with a security apparatus comprising thousands of fighters.

The Qatari capital serves as an informal base for Hamas, from which it cultivates ties with the Arab and Islamic world. Al-Hayya is known to have good relations with Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Arab countries such as Qatar, Egypt and Algeria, as well as with Iran, according to an official close to him.

Highlighting his pragmatic and conservative temperament, the official said: “He doesn’t get carried away easily and is respected by all members of the political bureau as well as by military commanders.”

Born in 1960, al-Hayya was raised in a religious and conservative family in Gaza before studying at the territory’s Islamic University. He then completed a master’s degree in Jordan, followed by a doctorate in Islamic law in Sudan. He spent three years in Israeli prisons in the late 1990s.

In 2006, al-Hayya headed Hamas’s parliamentary bloc after it had just won elections. The subsequent months of political and administrative discord marked the beginning of the schism between the Islamist movement and Fatah, the party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Al-Hayya, who has repeatedly stressed the importance of armed struggle, has survived several Israeli assassination attempts, including in 2007 and 2014. One military operation targeted his house in the northern Gaza Strip in 2007, leaving his wife and three of his children dead.

More recently, he and Meshaal survived an Israeli strike in Doha in September 2025 that left several dead, including one of his sons and his chief of staff.

Published in Dawn, July 21st, 2026