Khalil al-Hayya inherits a Hamas tested by 7 October's legacy

On 20 July, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) announced the election of Khalil al-Hayya as head of its political bureau. He succeeds Yahya Sinwar, who was assassinated by Israel in Gaza in October 2024, and who took over following Ismail Haniyeh’s killing by Israel in Tehran that same year.

Al-Hayya is the third leader to take up the position in just two years.

There is no doubt that the leadership renewal and succession within Hamas, amid an Israeli war of extermination against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and a campaign to eradicate the movement following the Al-Aqsa Flood, point to the ability of Hamas to endure, adapt and recover. This is particularly striking given that Israel has systematically and brutally sought to strip the movement of its political, military, security and grassroots leaders.

The ability to endure, adapt and recover is not new to Hamas, nor is it confined to the past three years. Since its establishment in late 1987, Israel has sought to undermine the movement, which played an effective role in the Palestinian uprising at the time and gave it significant momentum.

A history of targeting Hamas

Israeli efforts did not stop at arrests, deportations and the assassination of movement leaders and activists. Israel also worked to engineer an effective security relationship with the Palestinian Authority, established in 1994 under the Oslo Accord, to crush Hamas, weaken its effectiveness, and even change its resistance identity. Yet all of those attempts failed.

With the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising in 2000, Hamas returned stronger, more effective and more influential despite successive arrests and assassinations targeting the movement, including its top leadership. Hamas’ founder and spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and his successor, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, were both assassinated by Israel in 2004, as well as Salah Shehadeh, the head of its military wing, who was assassinated in 2002. Before that, in 2001, Jamal Mansour and Jamal Salim, the two prominent leaders in the occupied West Bank, were also assassinated. Nevertheless, Hamas continued to grow stronger and to renew its leadership through generational succession, which gave it greater youthfulness and vitality.

All of these names represent only a fraction of the movement leaders targeted by arrest, deportation and assassination.

This remarkable ability to renew its ranks and recover over nearly four decades prompted Israeli intelligence officials to describe the movement as the Hydra serpent. Indeed, this association with the mythical creature from Greek mythology, usually depicted as a serpent or many-headed water monster whose severed head is replaced by two others, suggests a movement with renewed strength as well as multiplying danger.

If the past three years provide any evidence, they reinforce that earlier Israeli intelligence assessment. Three heads of the movement's political bureau have succeeded one another following assassinations, along with four chiefs of staff during the same period. And despite thousands of members being killed or imprisoned, the movement remains resilient.

This is not to deny that it has been severely exhausted and weakened, particularly given the destruction of its popular base in the Gaza Strip, the continued targeting of its presence in the occupied West Bank, as well as the pursuit of its members outside occupied Palestine. It is certainly the reality that Khalil al-Hayya, the new leader of Hamas, will be forced to confront, especially given Israel’s previous failed attempt to kill him in Doha in September 2025.

Further challenges

However, al-Hayya's challenges don’t stop there. Today, Hamas faces a new and different set of challenges that affect its very essence, identity, and internal cohesion.

Over the previous four decades, Hamas's resistance and sacrifices translated into political and popular gains, most clearly demonstrated in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, in which the movement won a landslide victory. This enabled it to form the Palestinian government.

Following much political upheaval in this period Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip following clashes with the Palestinian Authority security forces controlled by Fatah, which refused to recognise the legislative election results. The subsequent brutal Israeli blockade, in which Arab and international parties participated, including the Palestinian Authority, Hamas found itself burdened with governing the Gaza Strip and managing the daily affairs of more than two million residents.

Despite this, under the leadership of former political bureau head Khaled Meshaal, the movement maintained a difficult and complex balance between the needs of Gaza and its national identity.

Things began to change in 2017 with the election of Haniyeh as head of the political bureau and the growing influence of Yahya Sinwar, who was released in the 2011 Wafa al-Ahrar prisoner exchange agreement between Hamas and Israel.

With his charismatic personality, long record of struggle, administrative competence, and leadership abilities, Sinwar succeeded in shifting the centre of gravity, which had previously been divided among the Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank, the external leadership, and the prisons, firmly to Gaza. He also sent many Gaza-based cadres abroad, where they competed with other Hamas cadres over decision-making positions and the leadership of institutions.

That was not all. The Haniyeh-Sinwar current also deepened relations with Iran and Hezbollah as supporters of the resistance. But as numerous documents revealed over the past two years, they took this direction much further, to the point that Iran acquired an implicit and indirect role, through money and weapons, in determining leadership roles within the movement.

This was particularly evident through attempts to sideline Khaled Meshaal. Iran and Hezbollah accused him of being behind the decision to leave Syria under Bashar al-Assad in 2012 due to the crimes the regime was committing against the Syrian people.

Perhaps the election that ultimately brought al-Hayya to power is the clearest indication of Iran’s influence. The period following Sinwar's assassination witnessed a fierce campaign against Meshaal, his family and his current within the movement.

Divisions

The movement was consequently unable to conclude its elections in May because of severe internal polarisation, particularly amid complaints of interference in appointing replacements for leaders assassinated in the Gaza Strip.

But what has been outlined above represents only a small part of the changing environment confronting Hamas. The movement faces a brutal campaign of extermination, regional and international attempts to dismantle it; and, above all, internal divisions and bitterness arising from the perception among some factions that they are being marginalised and excluded.

In the past, sacrifice and resistance were the gateway to popular legitimacy for Hamas and other Palestinian factions. After 7 October, however, sacrifice and resistance became the path to legitimacy.

This is what propelled al-Hayya, the father of four martyrs, to become the leader of Hamas by a single vote over Meshaal (35-34). In the name of sacrifice, resistance and symbolism, no one dares to review the course of the Gaza leadership of Hamas since 2017.

Nor can it be ruled out that, in the name of those same sacrifices and resistance, Hamas may in future begin to fragment under the pretext of internal purification. Some may dismiss this possibility, but the experience of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan should not be absent from the minds of decision-makers in Hamas.

More importantly, the new leadership is required to find the difficult and complex balance between the catastrophic reality in Gaza and the Palestinian national project, which Fatah reduced to the illusions of Oslo and the remnants of historic Palestine. While Hamas became absorbed for more than a decade in governing the Gaza Strip, which has a claim on all Palestinians.

Fairness and objectivity indeed require us to recall that, under the leadership of Haniyeh and Sinwar, Hamas decided to defend Al-Aqsa against Israeli attacks in 2021 during the Sword of Jerusalem battle.

But fairness and objectivity also require us to say that Hamas needs to review its collective national discourse, in which the Gaza Strip occupies a central place but is not confined to it.

Article translated from Arabic by Afrah Almatwari. To read the original, click here.

Osama Abu Arshid is a Palestinian writer and researcher based in Washington

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