Hamas names Khalil al-Hayya head in Gaza, keeps leadership largely unchanged ahead of top vote

All three of Hamas’s previous top leaders—Sinwar in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh abroad, and al-Arouri in Judea and Samaria—were eliminated by Israel’s security forces within roughly a year after the Oct. 7 massacre.

By JNS

Khalil al-Hayya has been elected Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon’s Al-Akhbar newspaper reported on Monday, in an internal vote that left the terror group’s leadership structure largely unchanged ahead of an upcoming election for its top political post.

Khaled Mashaal was re-elected as Hamas’s leader abroad, while Zaher Jabarin was formally named to head the terror group’s operations in Judea and Samaria after succeeding Saleh al-Arouri following his assassination in January 2024.

The elections are a prelude to a vote for the leadership of Hamas’s political bureau, in which al-Hayya and Mashaal are expected to compete, likely within the next two weeks, according to Al-Akhbar.

Sources cited by the newspaper, which is affiliated with Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, said Hamas plans to appoint another senior figure from Gaza to replace al-Hayya if he is elected to the top post.

A U.S.-brokered ceasefire that took effect on Oct. 10, 2025, ended the two-year war that began when Hamas, other Palestinian terrorist groups, and Gazan civilians invaded Israel’s northwestern Negev on Oct. 7, 2023, slaughtering 1,200 people, wounding thousands, and taking 251 hostages.

All three of Hamas’s top leaders—Sinwar in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh abroad, and al-Arouri in Judea and Samaria—were eliminated by Israel’s security forces within roughly a year after the Oct. 7 massacre.

Before Oct. 7, al-Hayya served as deputy to Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar. He has maintained close ties with Tehran and was among the top Hamas officials who met with Iran’s now-slain supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.

Al-Hayya left the Gaza Strip before the Oct. 7 onslaught and has since mostly been based in Qatar, though he has also made visits to Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria.

He has since headed Hamas’s negotiating team in ceasefire talks with the United States.

Tony Blair, a founding member of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, told the U.N. Security Council last week that the organization had made “substantial progress” in implementing Washington’s peace plan for Gaza.

Blair pointed at the formation of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) and the International Stabilization Force (ISF), which he said recently completed its “pre-deployment assessment mission,” as key milestones in implementing Trump’s 20-point peace plan that ended the fighting.

“The critical demilitarization talks with Hamas are continuing, led with immense effort by the mediators Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey together with High Representative [for Gaza Nickolay] Mladenov and representatives of the Board of Peace,” according to the former British prime minister.

Senior Hamas leaders like Mashaal and Musa Abu Marzouk have rejected key parts of Washington’s peace plan in recent months, including disarmament, despite having agreed to the proposal in October.

The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s “military wing,” last month denounced calls for its disarmament under the ceasefire plan as “extremely dangerous.”