Who is Khalil al-Haya, the new leader of the weakened Hamas?

Khalil al-Haya, a senior Hamas official who survived an Israeli attack on Qatar in September last year and is believed to have good ties to Iran, was named the Palestinian group's top leader yesterday.

Analysts say this could signal a tougher stance by Hamas towards disarmament demands.

Al-Haja is considered to hold more radical views than Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas's exiled office and the other main contender for the top job.

Al-Hayya, who lost one son in the Gaza conflict and two in previous wars, is based in Doha with other Hamas leaders. His influence within the group has grown as other senior Hamas figures have been killed in Israeli strikes, including Ismail Haniyeh during a visit to Iran and Yahya Sinwar in the Gaza Strip.

Reuters writes that Al Haya played a key role in negotiating a ceasefire throughout the Gaza war. The war broke out after Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, prompting a major Israeli offensive that has since destroyed much of the enclave.

Al-Haja participated in indirect negotiations with Israel that led to a US-brokered ceasefire in October 2025. This largely halted fighting in Gaza, although Israel continued to attack Hamas and other militants it claims pose an imminent threat.

The earlier ceasefire initiative was supposed to be a topic of discussion for the 64-year-old al-Hayya and other Hamas leaders when they were the target of an Israeli attack on Doha on September 9, which killed six people but no senior Hamas officials.

Al-Haja, who has been considered Hamas' most influential figure abroad since the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Iran in July 2024, is a member of the five-member Qatar-based leadership council. That body has led Hamas since last year, when Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 2023 attacks, was killed.

Al-Hajja's victory sends a message that Hamas remains committed to armed struggle, rejects disarmament under any conditions, and intends to rebuild its military capabilities, while preserving its alliance with Iran and the so-called "axis of resistance."

Originally from the Gaza Strip, Al-Haja is a long-time member of the Islamist group. He is believed to have good ties to Iran, which is a major source of weapons and financial support for Hamas, and has been closely involved in the group's efforts to reach more ceasefires with Israel. He played a key role in ending the 2014 conflict, as well as in efforts to stop the current war in Gaza.

Al-Haja has been a member of Hamas since the group's founding in 1987. In the early 1980s, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, the Sunni Islamist movement from which Hamas emerged, along with Haniyeh and Sinwar, according to Hamas sources.

Israel arrested him several times in Gaza.

An Israeli airstrike in 2007 hit his family home in the Shejaya neighborhood of Gaza City, killing several of his relatives. His son Hamza was killed in an Israeli airstrike in 2008.

During the 2014 war between Hamas and Israel, the house of his eldest son Osama was bombed, killing him along with his wife and three of their children.

Al-Haja left Gaza several years ago and became Hamas's chief representative for relations with the Arab and Islamic world, based in Qatar. He accompanied Haniyeh on a visit to Tehran in July 2024, when Haniyeh was assassinated.

Al-Haja reportedly said that the October 7 attacks were intended as a limited Hamas operation, aimed at capturing “a certain number of soldiers” for exchange for imprisoned Palestinians.

“But the Zionist army unit has completely disintegrated,” he said in a statement released by the Hamas-affiliated Palestinian Information Center, referring to the Israeli army.

He said the attack succeeded in bringing the Palestinian issue back to the center of international attention.

Hamas-led militants killed about 1.200 people in the attacks and kidnapped 251 others, according to Israeli figures. Since then, more than 73.000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli offensive in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

In addition to leading Hamas delegations in brokered negotiations aimed at achieving a ceasefire, Al-Haja also performed a number of other important political duties for the group.

He led a Hamas delegation to Damascus in 2022 to restore relations with then-Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Relations had been severed ten years earlier, when Hamas supported the largely Sunni-led uprising against Assad, while Assad belongs to the minority Alawite community.

Reuters reports that the rift has weakened the regional alliance that Iran has built to counter Israel and the United States.

Hamas faces some of its toughest challenges since its founding, weakened by two years of war and under international pressure to disarm. Israel still controls more than 60 percent of the coastal enclave, attacks continue, and conditions for Gaza's two million residents remain extremely difficult.

Palestinian political analyst Reham Ovda assessed that Al-Hajja's victory sends a message that Hamas remains committed to armed struggle, rejects disarmament under any conditions, and intends to rebuild military capabilities, while preserving its alliance with Iran and the so-called "axis of resistance."

“This indicates that the disarmament negotiations are likely to face serious difficulties and obstacles,” Ovda told Reuters.