Hamas has named senior figure Khalil al-Hayya as its new leader, the Palestinian resistance group announced on Monday.<\/p>\n
The veteran figure replaces former leader Yahya Sinwar, who was killed in battle by Israeli occupation forces in October 2024.<\/p>\n
Hayya has long been one of Hamas\u2019 top leaders living abroad, and has been a central figure in negotiations over the past three years.<\/p>\n
Sinwar was killed on October 17, 2024, during direct combat with the Israeli army in Rafah, southern Gaza.<\/p>\n
His martyrdom came after previous leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated by Israel in July 2024 in the Iranian capital Tehran.<\/p>\n
After Sinwar\u2019s death, Hamas decided not to elect a new leader, but to form a cabinet of five leaders, led by Muhammad Ismail Darwish, the head of the movement\u2019s Shura Council.<\/p>\n
Hayya himself was targeted by an Israeli assassination attempt in September last year in Doha.<\/p>\n
Born in Gaza in 1960, Hayya is first reported to have met Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 1980, some seven years before Hamas was formed.<\/p>\n
One of the earliest members of Hamas’ political wing, Hayya held several positions in student and workers’ unions, and was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) in 2006.<\/p>\n
In 2007, during a botched Israeli assassination attempt against him, a number of his family members, including his wife and three children, were martyred.<\/p>\n
Since then, he has played a key role in negotiating a ceasefire with Israel during the 2014 war on Gaza, as well as during the ongoing genocide which began in October 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 2022, he travelled to Damascus to formalise the restoration of ties with the Syrian government after they frayed following the Arab Spring uprisings and the Syrian civil war.<\/p>\n
Sources close to the Palestinian movement told Middle East Eye at the time that all senior leaders targeted in the attack survived, including Hayya, Khaled Meshal, Zaher Jabarin, and others.<\/p>\n
The attack killed Khalil al-Hayya\u2019s son, Hammam al-Hayya, and his office director, Jihad Lubbad. Several others were wounded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hamas has named senior figure Khalil al-Hayya as its new leader, the Palestinian resistance group announced on Monday.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":215772,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[13516,1411,34,30653,69,5744],"class_list":["post-215771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tehran","tag-assassinations","tag-hamas","tag-iran","tag-khalil-al-hayya","tag-tehran","tag-yahya-sinwar"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116955662526037032","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215771\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}