Hamas Names Founding Member as Political Leader to Succeed Yahya Sinwar

The Hamas terrorist organization on Monday named Khalil al-Hayya to become the head of its political bureau, taking the post previously held by Yahya Sinwar, the October 7 mastermind who was eliminated by an Israeli strike in July 2024.

Al-Hayya himself survived an Israeli airstrike on the office Hamas maintains in Doha, Qatar, in September 2025.

“Like Mr. Sinwar, Mr. Al Hayya — also known as Abu Ousama — was imprisoned by Israel for three years in the early 1990s. He survived several assassination attempts attributed to Israel, one of which killed nearly 30 of his relatives, including his wife and three of his children,” The National noted on Monday.

Sinwar was only Hamas’s political leader for 70 days. He took over from Ismail Haniyeh, who was also generally considered to be the overall leader of Hamas. Haniyeh was killed at the end of July 2024 by a bomb that was reportedly smuggled into the guesthouse in Tehran, where he had traveled for the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz later took credit for the assassination.

Sinwar’s brief reign ended when he crossed paths with an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) unit while attempting to sneak out of Gaza. The position of political leader went unfilled until now.

According to Al Jazeera News, al-Hayya ran a tight race for leadership against Khaled Meshaal, who was chief of the Hamas political bureau from 1996 to 2017 when he was replaced by Haniyeh in a leadership reshuffle.

The votes were cast by the General Shura Council, the ruling body of Hamas. None of the candidates obtained the required number of votes in the first round, so Al-Hayya and Meshaal went to a run-off election. Meshaal actually took more votes in the first round, but al-Hayya won the runoff.

Al-Hayya, 65, is a Gaza native who became one of the founding members of Hamas in 1987. He was arrested by Israeli authorities several times during the “intifada” turmoil of the 1980s and went on to hold a number of major positions within Hamas, often serving as a negotiator in the group’s dealings with Israel.

Al-Hayya had a leading role in efforts to use Israeli hostages as leverage for a ceasefire during the war Hamas launched with the October 7, 2023 massacre, and he was a member of the five-man group that has managed the group’s political affairs since Sinwar’s death in 2024.

The leftist newspaper New York Times (NYT) on Monday quoted analysts who said al-Hayya “belongs to a faction within Hamas more aligned with Iran, while his opponent in the elections, Mr. Meshal, was closer to Sunni Arab states like Qatar.”

Palestinian analyst Reham Owda told Reuters that al-Hayya’s appointment sends a message that “Hamas remains committed to armed struggle, rejects disarmament under any conditions, and ​intends to rebuild its military strength while preserving its alliance with Iran and the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance.’”

“This indicates that ​negotiations related to ⁠disarmament are likely to face significant difficulties and obstacles,” Owda predicted.

Those negotiations were not going well to begin with and, while the administration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has yet to comment on the new Hamas political leader, the Israelis are unlikely to be enchanted by the Shura Council’s choice.

The Jerusalem Post recalled al-Hayya claiming that the October 7 massacre began as a limited operation to kidnap a few Israeli soldiers, but spiraled out of control into a deranged orgy of rape and murder when “the Zionist army unit completely collapsed.”

Feelings of antipathy between the new Hamas chief and Israel will likely be mutual, as Al Jazeera noted al-Hayya has lost about 30 family members to Israeli military action over the years, including a wife and several children.

The BBC suggested that Meshaal and his supporters wanted Hamas to “draw lessons from the war, move away from a strategy centred primarily on armed confrontation, and adopt a more pragmatic political approach while preserving the movement’s core objectives.”

Al-Hayya, on the other hand, is a “hardliner” who wants battle-hardened Gaza War veterans to lead a movement that “remains firm against pressure to make major concessions, particularly over the issue of disarmament.”