A senior Hamas official told AFP on Sunday that the Palestinian Islamist movement was in the final phase of selecting a new leader, with two prominent figures competing for the position.

Hamas recently completed the formation of a new Shura Council, a consultative body largely composed of religious scholars, as well as a new political bureau.

Members of the council are elected every four years by representatives from Hamas’s three branches: the Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank and the movement’s external leadership.

Hamas prisoners in Israeli jails are also eligible to vote. The council subsequently elects the political bureau, which in turn selects the head of the movement.

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“The movement has completed its internal elections in the three regions and has reached the final stage of selecting the head of the political bureau,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorised to speak publicly. He added that the race for the group’s leadership is now between Khaled Meshaal and Khalil al-Hayya.

A second Hamas source confirmed the development within the organisation.

Hayya, 65, a Gaza native and Hamas’s chief negotiator in ceasefire talks, has held senior roles since at least 2006, according to the US-based NGO the Counter Extremism Project (CEP).

Meshaal, who led the political bureau from 2004 to 2017, has never lived in Gaza. He was born in the West Bank in 1956.

He joined Hamas in Kuwait and later lived in Jordan, Syria and Qatar. The CEP says he oversaw Hamas’s evolution into a political-military hybrid. He currently heads the movement’s diaspora office.

Last month, a Hamas source told AFP that Hayya enjoys backing from the group’s armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassem Brigades. After Israel killed former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July 2024, the group chose its then-Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar as his successor.