Khalil al-Hayya in His Own Words

Khalil al-Hayya was elected head of Hamas’ political bureau in July 2026, succeeding Yahya Sinwar, the leading architect of the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack against Israel, which was the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Hamas, which the United States has designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization since 1997, selected al-Hayya after a closely contested council vote against former Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal.

Al-Hayya’s narrow victory over Khaled Mashal reflected a contest over patrons, tactics and Hamas’s post-war strategy, not ideology or moderation. It preserved the ascendancy of the movement’s Tehran-aligned military leadership in over Mashal’s Doha and Ankara aligned diaspora camp. 

Al-Hayya's camp focuses primarily on reconstituting Hamas’ armed capacity in Gaza with the continued help of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Mashaal also favors strengthening Hamas’ military capacity and has said that he considers removing Hamas’ weapons as tantamount to “removing its soul.” However, he also wants to focus on building Hamas’ regional diplomatic integration through the same Qatari-Turkish axis that helped rehabilitate Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) from a designated global terrorist group to the internationally recognized leadership of post-Assad Syria.

A longtime senior Hamas official, al-Hayya served as Sinwar’s deputy in Gaza and later became Hamas’s chief negotiator in ceasefire and hostage negotiations. His public statements since October 7 provide a consistent account of how he views the massacre: as a source of lasting pride, a strategic choice whose devastating consequences for Gaza and its people were anticipated by Hamas and considered a central component of a new phase in its war against Israel.

His first televised address as Hamas leader brought those themes together. Rather than signal moderation after nearly three years of war and enormous losses, al-Hayya honored the architects of October 7, framed the attack as the culmination of a century of confrontation and promised to continue an open-ended path of jihad and “resistance.”

A “Great Act” With a Foreseeably “Big” Response

One month after October 7, al-Hayya told The New York Times that Hamas had sought more than another limited clash. Its purpose, he said, was to transform the conflict:

“It was necessary to change the entire equation and not just have a clash.”

He said that by committing the October 7 terrorist attack, in which over 1,200 people were killed and 251 kidnapped, Hamas had succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue “back on the table” and added that “now no one in the region is experiencing calm.” Al-Hayya also acknowledged that Hamas anticipated a major Israeli response:

“What could change the equation was a great act, and without a doubt, it was known that the reaction to this great act would be big.”

He rejected the proposition that Hamas’s central purpose was to govern Gaza or provide for its population:

“Hamas’s goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such.”

The remarks show that Gaza’s devastation was not an unforeseen contradiction of Hamas’ strategy. Al-Hayya described the attack as a deliberate attempt to produce a crisis large enough to reorder the regional and international agenda.

From Foreseeable Cost to an “Impenetrable Shield”

By October 2024, the scale of the war’s human cost was clear. In an interview with the BBC, al-Hayya again framed October 7 as a deliberate policy choice whose aim was to change the terms of the global discussion about Palestinian national demands:

“We had to sound an alarm to the world to tell them that we are a people with a cause and demands.”

According to the BBC, al-Hayya did not express regret when pressed about the offensive and its human cost. Instead, he said “Israel’s occupation” was at the root of the violence and killing in the Middle East. Hamas considers all of Israel as “occupied territory,” and often refers to the State of Israel as the “occupation.” Following the announcement of a ceasefire and hostage-release agreement in January 2025, al-Hayya again celebrated October 7. He described the attack on men, women and children in Israel carried out by the Qassam Brigades as an achievement to be remembered across generations:

“What the elite forces of the Qassam Brigades did on October 7, a miraculous military and security achievement, will remain a source of pride for our people and our resistance, passed down from generation to generation. It struck the enemy entity a fatal blow.”

In the same address, al-Hayya praised the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah and the Houthis for supporting Hamas, accused Israel and its supporters of committing “Nazi-like crimes,” and described Gazans as the “protective shield for their resistance.”

The formulation was unusually candid. After acknowledging in 2023 that Hamas knew the response to its “great act” would be “big,” al-Hayya described the civilians who remained amid Gaza’s destruction as protective human shields for the “resistance.”

October 7 as Pride, Precedent and a “First Stage”

Al-Hayya repeatedly placed October 7 within a campaign that would continue beyond the war. On the attack’s first anniversary, he called it a “glorious crossing” that had shattered illusions about Israel’s military superiority. He praised the Palestinian people’s “enormous sacrifices of martyrs and wounded,” together with the destruction of “homes, mosques, universities and infrastructure,” as part of what he described as a new chapter written through “resistance, blood and steadfastness.”

In a January 31, 2025 eulogy for Hamas commanders killed during the war, al-Hayya said that among the foremost achievements of the “Al-Aqsa Flood” was “rubbing the nose of this usurping entity in the dirt” and “bringing down its prestige as an entity that cannot be defeated, and the prestige of its army as an army that cannot be broken.” He said Hamas’ fallen commanders had handed “the banner, still raised,” to a new generation that would “continue the march toward Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa.” He later pledged that a generation raised “at the tables of the Quran and in the arenas of jihad and resistance” would complete the journey and finish what Hamas’s founding leaders had begun.

Al-Hayya had articulated the intended endpoint of that struggle before October 7. Addressing an Islamic unity conference in Tehran in 2021, he characterized Israel and Zionism as a “cancer” within the Islamic nation that had to be removed.

In Tehran the following month, al-Hayya characterized October 7 not as a completed episode but as an opening phase:

“A new dawn has begun toward the liberation of Jerusalem and Palestine, and Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was only the first stage on the path toward the disappearance of the Israeli occupation and the victory of the Palestinian people.”

As before, Hamas considers the entirety of Israel to be occupied Palestinian land. In al-Hayya’s formulation, October 7 was therefore both an achievement to celebrate and a precedent for a struggle that remains unfinished – namely, the destruction of Israel.

Strategic Reward from Palestinian “Sacrifices”

Al-Hayya’s statements repeatedly frame Palestinian suffering as a sacrifice that produced strategic gains. In an October 2025 interview with Al Jazeera, he said:

“The Al-Aqsa Flood, despite the pain, victims, martyrs, wounded, prisoners, and destruction of homes and property that our people endured, moved the Palestinian cause into a new phase.”

Al-Hayya then argued that October 7 exposed what he called the true nature of Israel and produced “an intellectual revolution” and “an emotional revolution” around the world against it. He further claimed that the Palestinian deaths, suffering and grief endured during the war “did not go in vain,” but instead “had an effect and bore fruit.”

Later in the interview, al-Hayya said:

“The resistance did what it had to do. The price was great, but we believe and aspire that the return for these costs will also be commensurate with what the Palestinian people have endured.”

He immediately presented the Palestinian cause’s renewed international prominence as one such return, asserting that it had nearly been removed from the political agenda after years of marginalization but had now “returned.”

This language is consistent with his January 2025 eulogy, in which he said that “the blood and body parts of our leaders mixed with the blood and body parts of our people.” He portrayed that blood as watering the land so that “the tree of pride and dignity” could grow and “blossom into heroism and victory.”

In this rhetoric, Palestinian deaths are incorporated into Hamas’s theory of victory: sacrifices that sustain the organization, transform global politics and prepare future generations to continue its campaign.

No Change of Course as Hamas Leader

Al-Hayya’s election as Hamas leader in July 2026 provided an opportunity to signal a change in course. Instead, his first televised address as political bureau chief reaffirmed the leaders and strategy associated with October 7.

He began by describing his new position as a trust inherited from Hamas’s “righteous martyrs,” who had watered the movement with “their pure and virtuous blood.” He then pledged:

“The first thing we affirm is that we will continue on the same path and follow in the same footsteps, carrying the banner high and fluttering until it rests above Al-Aqsa and across a free and proud Palestine.”

Al-Hayya placed October 7 at the culmination of a continuous history of “resistance,” beginning with the 1929 Hebron massacre and  Safed massacre, which al-Hayya calls “the 1929 Buraq uprising” and extending through the Arab Revolt and the two intifadas:

“From the Al-Buraq Revolution, al-Qassam and the Great Revolt, through the successive revolutionary waves, to the blessed Intifada and the Al-Aqsa Intifada, culminating in the Great Flood, generation after generation has affirmed that our people resist, remain steadfast, do not relinquish or forget their land and rights.”

He then instructed Hamas members to follow the example of Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, the principal architects of October 7, alongside Hamas founders Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi and former leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Saleh al-Arouri. These men, he said, had “founded, built, waged jihad and continued the work and the journey.”

Al-Hayya also thanked Hamas’s regional allies, singling out the Islamic Republic of Iran and armed groups in Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq that, he said, had supported Hamas “with their blood and weapons.” He concluded with an explicit promise of an open-ended struggle:

“We are confident that the path of our people’s jihad and resistance, to which we are honored to belong, has an appointment with certain victory, no matter how long or short the time may be. We remain faithful to the pledge.... The storms of injustice will not defeat us, and we will not compromise over the blessed soil of Palestine.”

The address did more than commemorate Hamas’s former leaders. Delivered after nearly three years of war and enormous Palestinian losses, it set their course as the unchanged, unreformed program for Hamas’s new leadership. Al-Hayya presented October 7 as the culmination of earlier confrontations, honored its architects as models to follow and promised that Hamas’s jihad would continue for as long as necessary.

Conclusion

Al-Hayya’s own words reveal a consistent strategic narrative. He celebrates October 7 as a “miraculous” military achievement and a source of pride to be transmitted to future generations. He acknowledges that Hamas intended to elicit a “big” response, then describes Gaza’s civilians as the resistance’s “impenetrable shield” and Palestinian losses as sacrifices expected to yield a strategic reward. He calls the attack “only the first stage” in a continuing campaign and identifies its effect on global opinion as evidence of success.

His July 2026 inaugural address brought these ideas into a single program for Hamas’s future. Al-Hayya vowed to continue “on the same path,” framed the “Great Flood” (i.e. October 7) as the culmination of a generational struggle, honored Sinwar and Deif as models and promised that jihad and “resistance” would proceed toward “certain victory,” however long it took. His elevation to Hamas’s highest political office therefore represents continuity with the ideology and strategy behind October 7, not a departure from them.