+++ASP Who is Khalil al-Hayya, the new leader of Hamas?

Khalil al-Hayya has been elected as the new leader of Hamas. The news was announced by the terrorist organisation in a statement reported by the Israeli media. The senior official, who previously served as head of Hamas’s political bureau in Gaza, was the chief negotiator during the ceasefire talks aimed at ending the war in Gaza, which began following the attack on 7 October 2023.

The leadership position had officially been vacant since October 2024, when Yahya Sinwar, considered the mastermind behind the 7 October massacre, was killed by Israel in Rafah. Over the past two years, the organisation has been led by a five-member executive council, which also included al-Hayya, who yesterday prevailed over his rival Khaled Mesh’al in an internal vote conducted according to a mechanism described as “highly complex and secret for security reasons”, in which representatives of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails also took part, as reported by the Islamic Movement in a statement. According to a movement official quoted by AFP, al-Hayya won “by an overwhelming majority”, whilst the Qatari daily Al-Araby quotes another Hamas source: “By just one vote”. Al-Hayya’s election marks a continuation of the line taken by Sinwar and the previous leader, Ismail Haniyeh – who was also killed in an Israeli operation in the heart of Tehran in July 2024 – namely, alignment with the “Iranian Shia resistance axis”, despite Hamas being Sunni. Furthermore, the appointment is seen as a way of keeping the epicentre of the Palestinian cause in Gaza, in contrast to the line promoted by Mesh’al, who was born in the West Bank and is considered closer to Qatar and Turkey.

Al-Hayya has emerged as one of the movement’s most influential figures following the killing of Sinwar and Haniyeh. Born on 5 November 1960 in the Gaza Strip during the Egyptian occupation, al-Hayya is known by the nom de guerre Abu Osama. He holds a PhD in Sunnah and Hadith studies from the University of the Holy Qur’an and Islamic Sciences in Sudan, as well as bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Islamic studies from universities in Jordan and Gaza. One of the founders of Hamas, Al-Hayya joined the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1980s and was imprisoned in Israel for three years in the early 1990s, before returning to the organisation, where he rose through the ranks over a period of more than thirty years.

Elected in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, he was one of the proponents of the hardline stance against Fatah and was ousted from the Gaza Strip following the 2007 coup. He was Sinwar’s deputy in Gaza for many years, having left shortly before the 7 October attack on Sinwar’s orders to manage affairs from abroad. He has survived several assassination attempts by Israel. In 2007, a targeted Israeli air strike killed seven members of his family, but he survived as he was not at the site of the attack. During Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza, another Israeli attack targeted him and killed his son Osama, his wife and children, along with 19 other relatives, after their home in the Shujaiya neighbourhood of Gaza City was bombed.

On 9 September 2025, he survived an Israeli air raid on a residential complex in Doha, which was targeting senior Hamas officials. His son Hammam was killed in the Israeli attack. A close associate of Sinwar, according to the New York Times, he had discussed the details of the 7 October attack during a secret meeting in July 2023. Following the massacre, al-Hayya had stated that the operation had been ‘necessary to change the entire equation and not merely to seek a confrontation. We have succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and Hamas’s objective is not to administer Gaza and provide water and electricity, but, precisely, to refocus attention on the Palestinian cause’. In 2024, he also stated that Hamas would accept a ceasefire and lay down its arms if an independent Palestinian state were established within the pre-1967 borders and ‘Jerusalem were to be the capital’. He is leading the indirect negotiations with Israel, which last October led to the ceasefire agreement and the release of hostages, having also met in person with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. In the ongoing talks in Cairo with the Board of Peace, he is taking a hard line opposing the disarmament of Hamas.