Negotiating the Trump Deal offer, the leader of Hamas sees the mounting death toll in Gaza as “the way to victory” …..

…and a former Gaza correspondent recalls that Al-Hayya made false claims that he was bombed in his Gaza home.

Khalil Al-Hayya has declared that all the deaths in Gaza, including those of some of his own offspring, are a means to emerge victorious and to conquer Israel. Before starting indirect talks in Egypt with American and Israeli negotiators over whether Hamas will fall in with the Trump Plan, he said on video: “We ask, God willing, that their blood be the way to victory…. the way to Jerusalem… and the way to the glory of the Umma [Muslim Brotherhood terminology for ‘Islamic nation-community’] and its victory.” The use of ‘human sacrifices’ runs through Hamas and hardline Islamist thinking, ever since the Muslim Brotherhood was founded by Hassan Al-Banna. [According to Wikipedia, Banna in 1924 “called on Muslims to prepare for armed struggle against coonial rule; he warned Muslims against the “widespread belief” that “jihad of the heart” was more important than “jihad of the sword”.[14] He allowed the formation of a secret military wing within the Muslim Brotherhood, which took part in the Arab-Israeli conflict. [13]…”

Al-Hayya has also said previously that it is not Hamas’ job to take care of the civilian population’s needs during a war, where its own fighters must be prioritised. Along with his family, Al-Hayya left the Strip just before 7 October 2023, an indication that he was one of the few privy to the attack plans. Here is a comment made available to Cap-Rep, which allows publication of points of view without necessarily endorsing them.

Al-Hayya is one of the many Hamas leaders I’ve met who have specialised in using us media people to propagate their propaganda. Here’s just one relatively minor example. I went to Al-Hayya’s house in 2007. My colleagues had simply taken as ‘Gospel’ a Hamas statement that an Israeli jet had bombed al-Hayya’s house near Gaza City in an unprovoked attack.

I found his huge mansion had a guard-house in the street beyond its walls. Israel had not bobed the house — only a Hamas meeting at the guard-house. Only one website mezan.org got the facts right. The next day Al-Hayya was at Shifa Hospital to visit the injured. I was there too, as he told waiting journalists what a narrow escape he had had from death. We Western journalists can sometimes be either too gullible, or too willing to believe one side but not the other.

Al-Hayya ‘herocially’ survived the recent targeted attack on Hamas’s office in Qatar. His son and his office manager, he says, did not. Did we even bother to send reporters to Qatar to try and establish how the lower-rung Hamas staff — but not the two top leaders — were added to the ‘sacrifices’ his movement says it’s proud of. That is, the death and injuries of many thousands of Gazans since his movement’s mass murder of around a thousand civlians women, children and men on October 7 2023.

Hamas’s determination to continue a futile and ruinous war, by hiding among its own bewildered civilians and by refusing for two years to hand back all the civilian hostages it took, is firm testimony to a form of logic that uses unlimited human sacrifcices to pursue a relentless ideological and religious ‘victory’.

Right at the start of this October 7 war, the other surviving Hamas external leader Khaled Meshaal, told Sky News that Hamas was modeling itself on the Algerian revolution, where, he said, over a million people died to achieve independence. Hamas seems to think it can continue to ‘sacrifice’ a lot more lives in its bloody quest.

……This is the report in The Times to which the journalist was providing a comment. It focused on the realities facing Al-Hayya, saying he had failed nearly two years ago to “drag Hezbollah and Iran into a war with Israel that [Hamas top leader, the late Yahya] Sinwar believed would destroy the Jewish state”:

Khalil al-Hayya: the October 7 accomplice negotiating Hamas ‘surrender’

With President Trump promising ‘complete obliteration’, the negotiator’s diplomatic luck may have finally run out

Samer Al-Atrush, Middle East Correspondent

Monday October 06 2025, 1.30pm, The Times

Khalil al-Hayya, the veteran Hamas negotiator, once sought to persuade Iran and Hezbollah to join the October 2023 attack on Israel that led to war. Two years later, he is leading a delegation in Egypt to discuss what might amount to his group’s terms of surrender.

Hayya had been tasked by Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who was killed last year, to drag Hezbollah and Iran into a war with Israel that Sinwar believed would destroy the Jewish state. He partially succeeded — to the lasting detriment of both Hamas allies. The war that initially began in Gaza spread to Lebanon and Iran, killing most of Iran’s military command and devastating Hezbollah.

But Hayya remained standing through sheer force of luck. Last month, he and other members of the Hamas negotiating team survived an Israeli airstrike in the Qatari capital of Doha intended to decapitate the group. Instead, it renewed American pressure on both Hamas and Israel to come to the negotiations table.

Sinwar, the architect of the October 7 attack, had entrusted few of the political leadership with his plans. Documents taken by the Israeli military showed that he had been sent by Sinwar to meet with Iranian military commanders and Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah who was killed last year, to discuss a co-ordinated attack.

It was unclear whether they agreed and American intelligence later concluded that Iran was kept in the dark about the timing of the attack.

With Sinwar’s death last year, Hayya, who had led previous ceasefire negotiations with Israel in 2009 and 2014, became the group’s de facto head. Diplomats say he is more moderate than Sinwar was and more willing to be flexible in the negotiations with Israel. Despite his role in planning the October 7 attack, which killed more than 1,100 people and captured 251 as hostages, Hayya insisted that it had gone well beyond what was planned, which he claimed was a limited attack on soldiers.

In the days after October 7, Hayya justified the attack as necessary to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash”.

“We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table and now no one in the region is experiencing calm,” he said.

He may have been right: the war has led to Israel’s isolation internationally, save the stolid backing from the US and an increasing number of countries have recognised a Palestinian state.

But Gaza has been destroyed and according to the health ministry more than 67,000 Palestinians have been killed.

Many Gazans now blame Hamas for its destruction. President Trump’s peace proposal, which Hayya will be discussing this week, calls on the group to disarm and its leaders to be exiled. Hayya has little choice: the alternative, Trump warned, is “obliteration”.

• Gaza talks set to begin as Trump warns Hamas of ‘obliteration’