Battered but still breathing, Hamas is set to hold a long-delayed internal election to choose a new chief and political bureau in the coming weeks.

The vote, coming after a years-long military campaign aimed at dismantling the terror group’s rule over the Gaza Strip, will likely offer an indication of Hamas’s future direction while broadcasting its continued existence as an organized entity and its ability to project power.

Coming amid slow-moving negotiations aimed at disarming the group and installing a transitional leadership in Gaza under US President Donald Trump’s ceasefire proposal, the vote will serve to telegraph whether Hamas plans on continuing to fight Israel over Gaza or whether it will shift to a less aggressive stance aimed at buying the time needed to rehabilitate its strength in the Strip and beyond, according to expert Michael Milshtein.

“These elections are about which arena will lead Hamas,” said Milshtein, who heads the Palestinian Studies Forum at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center.

Hamas generally holds leadership elections every four years, but the latest vote, initially scheduled for 2025, was delayed by the war sparked by the terror group’s October 7, 2023, massacre. During the war, Israel assassinated most of the group’s senior political and military commanders.

According to reports in Arab media, the vote is now expected to take place in the coming weeks, roughly a year behind schedule, though the exact timing remains unclear.

Fighting in Gaza broke out following the October 7 onslaught into southern Israel, in which some 1,200 people were killed and another 251 were kidnapped, most of them civilians. Israel vowed in the wake of the worst massacre in its history to wipe out the group, launching a war that left much of Gaza in ruins and killed much of Hamas’s command structure.

However, many vestiges of Hamas rule and military strength remain intact since the October 2025 ceasefire took effect, particularly in the approximately 47 percent of Gaza outside of Israeli military control, where nearly all of the enclave’s Palestinians live.

Based largely outside of Gaza, Hamas’s politburo manages the group’s strategic priorities, including on the diplomatic front, and also directs the Hamas military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, which primarily operates in Gaza and the West Bank. According to Milshtein, a hierarchy remains intact whereby strategic decisions are made by the leadership abroad, while the military wing carries them out.

The elections have historically been conducted in secrecy, with only a few hundred to a few thousand senior members quietly casting ballots and Hamas keeping results under wraps to shield its operatives from exposure to Israeli assassination attempts. In 2021, however, the group’s confidence in its firm entrenchment in Gaza, with even Israel recognizing its de facto rule over the Strip, led the group to hold the vote in the open and officially announce who had won roles in the political bureau.

This time, Milshtein assessed, the process will likely be more limited and far more covert, given the heavy blows Hamas has sustained across multiple fronts.

“In 2021, Hamas held elections among some 20,000 people in Gaza — almost public elections. You can’t do that in Gaza in 2026,” he said, citing the devastation in the Strip and the extensive targeting of Hamas operatives. The only place where he believes organized voting can realistically take place is abroad.

Voting in other areas will also be challenging, at least in part due to Israeli actions against Hamas leadership since the October 7 attack.

“The entire Hamas leadership in the West Bank has been arrested and imprisoned since October 7, and the leadership structure inside prisons itself has been dismantled,” Milshtein said, referring to steps taken by the Israel Prison Service that ended the previous system of internal organization and autonomy for Palestinian security prisoners, including Hamas.

Despite these constraints, Milshtein stressed that coordination between Hamas leadership abroad and its military wing inside Gaza remains strong — and is expected to continue even after the selection of a new leader, who will likely remain outside the Strip for the foreseeable future.

“The ability of those outside Gaza to control what happens inside remains very high,” he said. “In Israel people often say there’s a disconnect, that they’re........

© The Times of Israel