Muhammad Shehada
+972 Magazine / August 6, 2026
Khalil al-Hayya is a known pragmatist. But the group’s militant wing aided his election — and it won’t accept Israel’s deliberately unworkable demands.
“Don’t be surprised if you see Al-Hayya entering an alliance with Dahlan and reestablishing Hamas’ relations with the Emirates,” a knowledgeable source in Gaza told me two weeks ago — referring to the newly elected leader of Hamas, Khalil al-Hayya, and the exiled former Fatah leader, Mohammed Dahlan.
Dahlan was once Hamas’ arch-nemesis in Fatah and the Palestinian Authority (PA). In the 1990s, he cracked down on Hamas with an iron fist, and his forces were accused of torturing detained Hamas leaders. After Hamas emerged victorious in the Palestinian election of 2006, Dahlan led rallies in Gaza calling Hamas “a bunch of murderers and thieves.” The Islamist movement accused him of orchestrating an assassination attempt in 2007 against then-Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh; the following year, Vanity Fair revealed that Dahlan had conspired with the CIA to carry out a military coup against Hamas’ newly elected government.
After Hamas violently consolidated its power in Gaza and destroyed Dahlan’s home, he relocated to the West Bank. But in 2011, he was expelled from Fatah and the PA by President Mahmoud Abbas, who accused him of corruption and involvement in the death of former President Yasser Arafat. Dahlan (who denies all of these allegations) subsequently moved to the UAE, where he has since become an influential adviser to President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
Hamas first began cozying up to Dahlan in 2013 as a way to mend relations with Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and to pressure President Abbas, yet the relationship remained limited and Abu Dhabi has maintained a hostile stance toward Hamas — even helping to support Israel’s anti-Hamas proxy gangs in Gaza. But that appears to be changing, and fast.
Last week Dahlan met personally with Hamas and five other Palestinian factions in Egypt’s El-Alamein to finalize a roadmap for Gaza’s reconstruction — including the withdrawal of Israeli forces, the decommissioning of armed factions, and the transfer of governance from Hamas to a Palestinian technocratic body.
According to a senior Palestinian political source, Abu Dhabi even hosted a delegation from Hamas last month to increase their trust in that roadmap. The last time Hamas officials are known to have set foot in the UAE was in 2010, when the group’s chief of logistics, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, was assassinated by the Mossad in a Dubai hotel — which Hamas accused Dahlan’s men of being involved in.
Each of these accelerating developments would have been unthinkable just a few months ago. The UAE has been avowedly anti-Hamas for years, the negotiations in Egypt were deadlocked for months, and U.S. President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace appeared to be unravelling. So what changed? And what might come next?
Transformation or continuity ?
This past May, Hamas was supposed to hold an internal election to choose a successor for Yahya Sinwar, who had taken over as head of the group’s political bureau after Israel’s assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in July 2024, before Sinwar himself was killed in Gaza three months later. The Islamist group informed mediators that such elections were a crucial prerequisite to articulating a clear answer on the issue of decommissioning Hamas’ heavy weapons, and the group received guarantees that it could proceed.
The night before Hamas’ Shura Council members were due to cast their votes, Israel assassinated the group’s military chief, Izz Al-Din Al-Haddad, and derailed the election. On May 16, a significant portion of the 71 Shura Council members cast blank ballots as a protest, and the election was postponed for 20 days. Israel then assassinated Haddad’s successor, Mohammed Odeh, less than two weeks later, pushing the elections to the third week of July.
The race was incredibly tight between Khaled Meshaal, Hamas’ former top political leader representing the movement’s moderate wing, and Khalil Al-Hayya, Sinwar’s deputy who represented both the pragmatist and militant wings of Hamas. The two candidates ran diametrically opposite campaigns.
Meshaal campaigned on change and moderation. He advocated for reducing Hamas’ reliance on Iran, deepening its relations with the Arab world, and rebranding in ways that would help open up to the West. (Meshaal is known to have had good relations with Tony Blair, who even invited him to London after a series of meetings in 2015 and said “We were wrong to boycott Hamas.”) The wings of Hamas that Meshaal represents consider the October 7 attack to have been a strategic mistake or even a disaster, given the formidable price Gaza paid.
Meshaal had the backing of Qatar, Turkey, and the Muslim Brotherhood. He was excluded from the Gaza ceasefire negotiations in Cairo for two years due to an effective veto imposed by Yahya Sinwar and his successors inside the enclave, and only became involved last December.
Al-Hayya represented political continuity with Ismail Haniyeh, with whom he had a close friendship. He sits between Meshaal and Sinwar on the political spectrum, and has good relations with Hamas’ militant wing; during the campaign, Al-Hayya did not advocate for distancing Hamas from October 7 or Sinwar’s legacy. His wing of the movement enjoys the backing of Iran and Egypt.
During Gaza ceasefire negotiations, Al-Hayya got along well with Steve Witkoff, bonding over the fact that they were both “members of the same terrible club: parents who buried their children,” as Witkoff put it. Al-Hayya’s camp also hoped to persuade Iran to include Gaza in its ceasefire talks with the United States like it had done with Lebanon.
The final vote was very close: 35 for Al-Hayya, 34 for Meshaal. This represented a major boost for Hamas’ moderate wing compared to the 2021 election, when Meshaal stepped down and allowed Haniyeh to win uncontested in return for the directorship of Hamas’ external office.
What tipped the scale in Al-Hayya’s favour was the uncertainty over the path ahead, especially with Israel refusing to advance the Trump deal and repeatedly violating the ceasefire. Israel’s assassinations also factored in heavily.
Izz Al-Din al-Haddad, the slain military chief, was seen as close to Meshaal. In a letter he sent last year to the group’s leadership in Doha, he urged them to reunify their ranks and choose a new top leader; Al-Haddad named six potential candidates, including both Al-Hayya and Meshaal, but he put Meshaal’s name first.
This gesture from the head of the Al-Qassam Brigades represented the lifting of Sinwar’s veto on Meshaal. But Israel’s killing of Al-Haddad eliminated Meshaal’s key supporter in Hamas’ military wing.
Meshaal was also weakened by the fact that his spearheading of Hamas’ more moderate charter in 2017, which was seen as accepting Palestinian statehood on the 1967 borders, failed to produce tangible results. He was also one of the figures pushing Hamas to accept the Trump plan that has turned out to be a façade rather than a genuine ceasefire. Since 2017, the message from Hamas’ hardliners to the moderate wing has been that any dramatic change in the movement’s strategy or messaging would be redundant, since it would be ignored by the West.
More importantly, the elections took place under the looming prospect of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deciding to resume military operations and invade the remaining 30 percent of Gaza before Israel’s own elections, which would collapse even the façade of a ceasefire. In this context, Hamas’ leadership in Gaza preferred to have a Gazan close to the militant wing and Iran at the top of the organization.
At the same time, Al-Hayya is seen inside Hamas as more of a bureaucratic manager than a charismatic rabble rouser, offering stability and preservation. Indeed, after he won, he made no changes to the top leadership positions.
Tough compromises
While stability was certainly part of his appeal, Al-Hayya also has credentials as a Gazan from the Hamas stronghold of Shuja’iyah and the father of four martyrs — two of whom were killed after October 7. This may actually strengthen his ability to go in a different direction: to make tough compromises that Hamas’ external leadership would not have been able to pursue without their legitimacy being questioned.
In recent months, Meshaal has been under constant attack on social media from accounts run by individuals close to Hamas’ Gaza branch, accusing him of corruption, nepotism, and capitulation. Such public attacks were so unprecedented that Meshaal’s wing pushed Hamas’s leadership to issue a rare official statement naming and condemning those specific social media accounts. Speculation grew that Hamas might split into two factions.
Al-Hayya is now being referred to by those same accounts as the “warrior leader” and the “warrior sheikh.” Such branding is necessary to earn the trust of the militants who are now supposed to engage in an extremely sensitive process of decommissioning their weapons.
Hamas and other armed factions in Gaza do not trust that Israel will honour its obligations of withdrawing from Gaza and allowing reconstruction under the second phase of the Trump deal. This is because Israel never truly fulfilled any of its far more basic obligations under the first phase of the agreement, such as suspending its bombing of Gaza and allowing the entry of sufficient humanitarian aid.
Decommissioning would therefore leave Gaza defenseless, taking away Hamas’ only remaining leverage in the negotiations. As such, Hamas has been insisting that disarmament only occur after Israel fully withdraws from Gaza. It has also demanded the right to retain defensive weapons, including personal firearms necessary for an insurgency should Israel re-invade Gaza.
Israel, on the other hand, has been demanding the total disarmament of Hamas and other factions as a precondition to withdrawal, reconstruction, suspension of daily bombings, and even permitting a new governing body — the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) — to take over from Hamas.
The Board of Peace’s new roadmap, which Al-Hayya agreed to in Egypt last week, bridges the gap between these two opposing positions. It mandates that Israel should first fulfil its obligations under phase one of the ceasefire to create trust that it would comply with phase two. It demands that Israel immediately allow the NCAG into Gaza in order for it to build the necessary legitimacy before taking away and storing heavy weapons. And it requires Israel to deploy the International Stabilization Force (ISF) in Gaza to create a buffer between the population and Israel’s army, providing a greater sense of safety about laying down arms while simultaneously advancing the withdrawal process.
According to the roadmap, decommissioning would then occur hand in hand with Israel’s withdrawal, rather than before or after. The weapons would be locked up by the NCAG instead of being given to Israel or destroyed, a clever spin to avoid a spectacle of surrender or denouncing Palestinians’ right to armed resistance as an occupied people. Hamas and other factions would be allowed to retain personal weapons under the condition that they obtain a license from the NCAG.
Mohammed Dahlan played a crucial role in sealing this deal last week, aided by the fact that he is an adviser to the UAE president, a senior Palestinian politician, and a close friend of Jared Kushner. For Hamas, the bitter pill of decommissioning was sweetened by including a clause in the roadmap whereby $400 million would be allocated to settling government debts owed to civil servants, contractors, and private companies going back two decades, helping to salvage the group’s domestic popularity. Most of this money is expected to come from the UAE.
Furthermore, a source close to the talks told me that Dahlan has been discussing certain political arrangements concerning the upcoming Palestinian legislative election, set to take place in November 2026. According to this source, Dahlan has held talks with Hamas, left-wing parties (including the PLFP and DLFP), and Marwan Barghouti’s faction in Fatah to assess the possibility of forming a united opposition to President Mahmoud Abbas and his acolytes.
Israeli sabotage
In the talks leading up to last week’s agreement on the Board of Peace roadmap, Palestinian factions demanded guarantees from mediators that if they were to accept disarmament, Israel would be forced to stick to its side of the deal. But no sooner had Hamas and the other factions signed the agreement than Israel began escalating its bombing campaign in Gaza and Netanyahu rushed to reject the agreement. Far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir called the roadmap “unacceptable” and vowed: “Targeted killings in Gaza must continue, encouraging emigration must happen, Israel must win.” On Monday, an Israeli official affirmed “Israel will not withdraw from the current line in the Gaza Strip.”
For Dahlan, this came as no surprise. “We had been aware … that Netanyahu would do everything in his power to kill the opportunity that President Donald Trump worked on,” he wrote on X. “Today the entire world sees the gravity of the massacre he committed to block the path to the greatest promising opportunity to begin ending the war and establishing security for our people in Gaza and for all parties.”
Mediators have been warning for months that regardless of the details of the agreement, Netanyahu would not allow any progress in Gaza with Israel’s elections looming — especially when his coalition partners and party members have been campaigning on rebuilding settlements in Gaza and taking pride in the enclave’s total destruction.
Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace’s High Representative for Gaza, rebuked Israel for “two days of strikes across Gaza [that] have killed civilians and destroyed medical supplies.” But instead of pressuring Netanyahu, the Board of Peace is now taking his side.
After meeting the Israeli prime minister on Monday, the Board issued a statement reneging on the agreement and re-writing its terms such that no Israeli withdrawal would be required before Gaza’s total disarmament, including light weapons. Israel is further demanding that it retain the right to bomb Gaza whenever it deems necessary even after the agreement takes effect, and that weapons collected by the NCAG be immediately destroyed rather than stored.
These demands are deliberately unworkable. Even if Hamas’ leadership abroad is somehow conned into accepting, militants on the ground would refuse to comply, seeing it as an admission of defeat.
Moreover, even if Trump eventually decides to pressure Netanyahu to implement the agreed roadmap, Israel would have numerous ways to obstruct, undermine, or collapse the process during implementation. The most obvious would be to use the roadmap to advance the “New Rafah” plan: building a caged concentration camp or Potemkin village in the south of Gaza as a PR stunt to buy time and allow the siege, bombing, and displacement of the rest of the Strip to continue in full force.
Before the roadmap was agreed, Israel had actually succeeded in convincing the Board of Peace to drop its Gaza reconstruction plan and instead join the “New Rafah” scheme. The Israelis argue that since the city of Rafah has been fully depopulated and razed to the ground, and is now tightly controlled by the Israeli military, it is therefore the perfect place to deploy the ISF and the NCAG. At the same time, Israel opposes any genuine reconstruction even in “New Rafah”; at most, it offers to allow shipping containers to be used as homes for a miniscule fraction of the population or to serve as offices for the NCAG.
Indulging Israel’s maximalism will only lead to the continuation of the genocide. It also risks tilting the balance of power inside Hamas toward the hardliners, which is precisely what Netanyahu wants. Palestinian pragmatism, no matter how authentic or painfully earned, remains powerless against an occupier whose political survival depends on perpetual war, and for whom no Palestinian compromise is ever enough.
For most Palestinians in Gaza, meanwhile, Hamas’ leadership election has garnered little attention. The demands of the street remain the same: that Hamas steps down from government and does everything possible at the negotiating table to end Israel’s bombardment and initiate the Strip’s reconstruction, and that elections be held swiftly for a new Palestinian leadership. The demand for accountability for those who decided to launch the October 7 attack is also felt strongly, but such accountability can only be manifested at voting stations.
Muhammad Shehada is a Gazan writer and political analyst, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations
