Senior Hamas official Khalil Al Hayya, targeted with others in an Israeli operation in Doha on Tuesday, had been leading the group’s negotiating team in efforts to end the war in Gaza.
The unprecedented attack in the Qatari capital struck residential buildings where Mr Al Hayya and other Hamas leaders were reportedly meeting to discuss the latest US ceasefire proposal.
Israel said it had targeted Hamas’s leadership. Doha swiftly condemned what it called a “cowardly attack”, confirming the strike hit residential units used by the group. Hamas later told Al Jazeera the leadership group had survived.
It has been run by a six-man team that brought together senior officials in the occupied Palestinian territories and the diaspora.
The high-ranking members of the joint leadership are Khaled Mashal, Hamas leader until 2017, Mr Al Hayaa, and Zaher Jabareen, the group's intelligence and financial chief. All three are based in Qatar and Mr Jabareen also spends time in Turkey.
Latest developments
- 'Unhappy' Trump says attack in Qatar was not his decision
- Israel claims it used 'precise munitions', but killed Qatari security agent
- Qatar says it got warning from US only ten minutes after it started
- Target was Hamas's leadership team involved in negotiating Gaza ceasefire deal
- UAE president Sheikh Mohamed expressed 'condemnation of blatant attack'
Also included in the collective leadership are two operational field commanders and Muhammad Darwish, head of the group's Shura Council, who lives in Turkey.
Mr Al Hayya has played a pivotal role in shaping Hamas’s future since the assassinations of Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar last year.
Like the late Mr Sinwar, Mr Al Hayya – known as Abu Ousama – was imprisoned by Israel for three years in the early 1990s. He survived several assassination attempts attributed to Israel, one of which killed nearly 30 of his relatives, including his wife and three of his children.
A founder of Hamas in the 1980s and a disciple of the group’s late spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Mr Al Hayya earned a doctorate in Islamic studies from a Sudanese university in 1997.
Under the supervision of Mr Haniyeh before his killing in Tehran in 2024, he led Hamas’s delegation in mediated talks with Israel, seeking a ceasefire and a deal to exchange hostages abducted on October 7 for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
'Reform and Change'
Earlier on Tuesday, sources told The National that Hamas had informed mediators it would not disarm before Israel withdrew from Gaza, rejecting a US proposal that required the group to surrender its weapons to end the war. Hamas accused US President Donald Trump of “manoeuvring and evading” by imposing “unacceptable terms”.
Mr Al Hayya’s political career began in 2006 when he ran in the legislative elections on the Reform and Change list in Gaza, winning a seat and later heading Hamas’s bloc in the Palestinian Legislative Council. These remain the last Palestinian elections to date. He went on to serve as deputy head of Hamas in Gaza and as head of its media office.
Regarded as closer to Tehran than Mr Mashal, Mr Al Hayya attended the Iranian President’s inauguration alongside Mr Haniyeh – before his assassination – while Mr Mashal was absent.
In 2022, he led a delegation to Damascus to meet former president Bashar Al Assad, reviving ties with Syria, and in late 2023 he travelled to Lebanon for talks with Hezbollah’s former leader Hassan Nasrallah on the Gaza hostage issue.
After Mr Haniyeh’s assassination and Mr Sinwar’s death in Gaza at the hands of Israeli forces, speculation has grown that Mr Mashal, a former physics teacher who led Hamas for more than two decades until 2017, could return to leadership.
Known as Abu Al Walid, Mr Mashal oversaw Hamas’s withdrawal from Syria in 2012 to Qatar and Turkey after the Assad regime suppressed an uprising and bombed Palestinian camps whose residents had joined the revolt.
Last year, it was reported that Qatar asked Hamas's political leadership at some point to leave the country.
