Hamas Elects Khalil Al-Haya as Head of Its Political Bureau

On Monday  , July 20, Hamas announced the election of Khalil al-Hayya as the head of its political bureau, succeeding Yahya al-Sinwar, who was killed during a clash with the Israeli occupation forces in the city of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, on October 16, 2024.

Media sources close to the movement said that al-Hayya, who made a decisive lead in the last round of voting, won a large percentage of the votes of the movement's members in the West Bank and Israeli prisons, against his rival, former head of the political bureau and head of Hamas abroad, Khaled Mashaal, who received near-unanimous approval from voters abroad and part of the West Bank votes.

The sources explained that the election of Al-Hayya came after the completion of the rounds of runoffs in Gaza, prisons, the West Bank and abroad, where the results showed a near unanimous decision on his choice to lead the political bureau, under the complex circumstances that the movement is going through after the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 31, 2024, and  the killing of his successor, Yahya Sinwar, less than a year later.

The newspaper "The New Arab", quoting reliable sources in the movement, reported that the electoral process was completed within two days, and that the announcement of the result came before the second anniversary of Haniyeh's assassination, as previously planned.

Al-Hayya faces great internal and external challenges

Khalil al-Hayya, who headed the negotiating delegation in the Gaza war file and lost 3 of his sons in Israeli attacks, is one of the most prominent political leaders in the movement, and is expected to face major internal and external challenges related to managing the next phase, completing the plan to stop the war on Gaza, and rearranging the movement's regional and international relations.

In previous statements, Musa Abu Marzouq, head of Hamas' international relations office, explained that what is happening within the movement is not a comprehensive elections at the grassroots level, but rather a Shura organizational measure aimed at filling the vacancies in leadership positions, including the position of head of the political bureau, to complete the remainder of the current cycle, which ends in a few months.

It is noteworthy that Ismail Haniyeh assumed the presidency of the movement's political bureau in 2021 for the second consecutive term, before his assassination in Tehran, to be succeeded by Sinwar until his death in Rafah, and then a five-member leadership council temporarily took over the management of the movement's affairs, which included al-Hayya, Meshaal, Zaher Jabareen, Nizar Awadallah, and Mohammad Darwish, until the election of a new head of the political bureau.