The new leader of Hamas: an old guard hawk whose four sons Israel has killed

BarcelonaHamas announced on Monday the name of the man who will politically lead the Islamist organization after the internal election process to replace the last leaders killed by Israel. It is Khalil al-Hayya, a hawk from the old guard who participated in the founding of the organization in Gaza, on the eve of the First Intifada, in 1987. Al-Hayya was already part of the five-man council that was provisionally appointed after in 2024 Israeli soldiers killed Yahya Sinwar, the leader of the Islamists within the Strip, considered the mastermind of the October 7 attacks. In turn, Sinwar had replaced Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of the movement who died in an Israeli attack in Tehran in 2024, a few months before his successor.

Al-Hayya's election occurred after neither he nor Khaled Meshaal, another historic leader of the Islamist organization, secured the direct support of more than half of the Shura Council, the body that governs the movement and culminates a complex transition process. His mandate is to extend until the end of 2027, when the electoral cycle ends.

Al-Hayya was born in Gaza in 1960, and his childhood was marked by the Six-Day War of 1967 and the subsequent occupation of the Strip. He studied Islamic studies at the Islamic University of Gaza and obtained a master's degree from the University of Jordan in 1986. He was one of the founders of Hamas along with its spiritual leader, Sheikh Yassin, in 1987, and was imprisoned during the First Intifada. Twenty years later, he earned a doctorate in Islamic studies in Sudan.

With Hamas's leap into institutional politics in the 2008 elections, Al-Hayya won a seat for Hamas, and in recent decades has held positions of responsibility such as second-in-command of the organization in Gaza and head of its institutional relations office with Arab and Muslim countries. From this position, he was a member of the negotiating teams with Israel after the wars of 2012 and 2014, and also participated in the negotiations that led to the so-called ceasefire last October in Gaza, under which the Palestinians handed over the last Israeli hostages kidnapped in Gaza. He operated from Qatar, which has hosted the organization's exile leadership since 2012.

The veteran leader has seen many of his relatives die. In 2007, an Israeli bombing destroyed the family home and killed two of his brothers. In 2008, his son Hamza, a combatant in the organization's military wing, died in a drone attack. In 2014, his eldest son Osama died, along with his wife and three of his children, in another bombing. And this year, another of his sons, Asszam, died in an attack in the Daraj neighborhood, in Gaza City. He himself survived the Israeli attack on the Doha hotel where Hamas's negotiating delegation was meeting last September, in which his son Humam, his chief of staff, and three bodyguards died.