SerpApi.Org
Hamas has named a negotiator close to Iran who survived an Israeli assassination attempt as its new leader on Monday.
Khalil al-Hayya, 65, replaced Yahya Sinwar, who was killed in combat with Israeli forces in October 2024. The new leader, who has lost multiple relatives to Israeli strikes, took the post after an unusually fraught contest.
In the first round of secret voting by the group’s council, neither al-Hayya nor Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas’s office in exile, secured the required majority, forcing a run-off – a split that revealed deep divisions over the future of Hamas.
The council draws its members from Gaza, the occupied West Bank – including men held in Israeli prisons – and the exiled leadership.
The election process began in January and was repeatedly interrupted by the wars in Iran and Lebanon and by continuing Israeli operations in Gaza.
Israel tried to kill al-Hayya in Qatar in September 2025, striking a building housing the Hamas delegation.
Al-Hayya survived the attack in Doha, but his son Hommam, his office director and several aides were killed.
His eldest son, Osama, daughter-in-law and three grandchildren were killed in the bombing of the family home during the 2014 war.
In 2008, his son Hamza, a member of the Qassam Brigades – Hamas’s military wing – was killed in a drone attack. Earlier this year, another son, Azzam, died of injuries sustained during an Israeli air raid in Gaza.
In total, al-Hayya has lost four sons and numerous relatives to Israeli strikes. That grief also produced an unlikely bond with a senior American envoy.
After Donald Trump broke protocol to allow direct contact with the designated terrorist group, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met al-Hayya in Egypt days after the Doha attack.
“We expressed our condolences to him for the loss of his son. He mentioned it. And I told him that I had lost a son, and that we were both members of a really bad club, parents who have buried children,” Mr Witkoff said, referring to his own son Andrew, who died at 22.
Mr Kushner said that when the two men spoke of their sons, “it turned from a negotiation with a terrorist group to seeing two human beings kind of showing a vulnerability with each other”.
Since Sinwar’s death, the group had been run by a five-member interim council that included both al-Hayya and Meshaal.
A senior Hamas official said the council would be dissolved, with its members submitting their resignations to the group’s council.
“The political bureau will meet in Istanbul within days to form committees and begin restructuring Hamas’s leadership bodies,” the official said.
Born in Gaza City and known as Abu Osama, al-Hayya holds a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence and was a founding member of Hamas in the late 1980s.
The contest with Mashaal was, in effect, a choice between two paths: al-Hayya’s continuation of Sinwar’s line, including accepting Iranian patronage over Palestinian factions, and Meshaal’s push for a strategic reassessment of Hamas’s direction.
Al-Hayya’s ties to Tehran run deeper than those of his rival, and he was one of the principal architects of the rapprochement that restored them.
After Hamas backed the uprising against Bashar al-Assad in 2011 and broke with Iran, al-Hayya was among those who pressed to rebuild the relationship.
In 2022 he led a Hamas delegation to Damascus to meet Assad and repair ties with Syria, a step towards returning to Iran’s orbit.
He attended the Iranian president’s inauguration alongside Ismail Haniyeh – Haniyeh was killed by Israel during that visit – while Meshaal stayed away, and about 16 months after Oct 7 he was in Tehran meeting Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, later killed in US-Israeli strikes.
