Hamas leader confirms plans to step down in 2017

Hamas political leader Khaled Mashaal has publicly confirmed long-circulating reports that he will not run for reelection in the terror organization’s upcoming internal elections, slated to take place in 2017.

“Next year Khaled Mashaal will be the former head of Hamas’s political bureau,” he said during a speech in Qatar.

Mashaal also claimed Hamas now held “several times the weaponry” it did during the 2014 war with Israel in the Gaza Strip, known in the Jewish state as Operation Protective Edge.

Arab media has reported that former Gaza prime minister Ismail Haniyeh is likely to replace Mashaal.

Read: The arcane pathway to Hamas’s top post, and who might win it

“There is almost an agreement inside the leadership of the political bureau that the two (other) expected candidates running for the presidency of Hamas would withdraw and therefore, allow Haniyeh to chair the movement,” an informed source told the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper earlier this month.

Mashaal, 60, has led the Hamas political bureau since 1996. He is a veteran politician with close ties to regional powers Qatar, Egypt and Turkey. He has been key to Hamas’s attempts to break out of political isolation following its violent takeover of Gaza in 2007. Mashaal has lived for the last several years in Qatar.

His second eight-year term ended in 2013. At that time, Mashaal claimed he would retire, but was allegedly persuaded to remain in position by the movement’s decision-making Shura council, which is believed to have about 60 members. According to Hamas legislature, he may not run for another term.

Mashaal has slowly been losing power within the terror group, amid a deepening rift between Hamas’s military wing and political leaders.

Haniyeh, 53, was the prime minister of the Gaza Strip from the 2006 elections until he was dismissed on June 14, 2007 by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. He has continued to act as Gaza’s de facto political leader.