Speaking at a Hamas event, Al-Hayya said the right to armed resistance is tied to the establishment of a Palestinian state and applies to all peoples under occupation. He said the group was “open to studying any proposals that preserve this right.”
International law recognizes the right of peoples under occupation to self-determination, including armed resistance.
The United Nations Charter affirms that principle, while UN General Assembly Resolution 37/43 recognizes the legitimacy of struggles against colonial and foreign domination “by all available means”. Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions classifies armed struggles against colonial domination or alien occupation as international armed conflicts.
Al-Hayya said the Palestinian resistance had achieved what he described as major strategic gains, including breaking Israel’s myth of strategic deterrence and claims of security superiority, leading to the collapse of the Israeli narrative that had dominated for decades “falsely and unjustly,” and contributing to the complication and retreat of the normalization project.
He called for the immediate formation of a technocratic committee of independent Palestinians to administer the Gaza Strip, saying Hamas was ready to hand over full responsibilities in all sectors and facilitate its work.
Al-Hayya said Hamas’s immediate priorities include completing the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire agreement, ensuring the entry of humanitarian aid and equipment needed to rehabilitate hospitals and infrastructure, and “reopening the Rafah crossing in both directions.”
The ceasefire, brokered by Cairo, Doha, Ankara, and Washington, and signed on 10 October in Egypt's Red Sea resort city, Sharm El-Sheikh, is fragile.
Since it began, Israeli forces have killed at least 367 Palestinians in repeated violations of the truce, adding to the more than 70,000 Palestinians killed since the start of Israel's genocidal war on the strip in October 2023, most of them women and children.
He said the group also remains committed to implementing the second phase of the agreement, which includes the full withdrawal of Israeli forces and the start of reconstruction, adding that Hamas rejects “all forms of guardianship or mandate over the Palestinian people.”
Referring to proposals for an international role in Gaza, Al-Hayya said any international force should be limited to monitoring the ceasefire and separating the two sides at Gaza’s borders, with no role inside the enclave or interference in its internal affairs.
He said a proposed Gaza “Peace Council” should be “overseeing the implementation of the ceasefire agreement, funding and supervision of the reconstruction of the Strip,” stressing that “the task of international forces must be limited to maintaining the ceasefire and separating the two sides at the borders of the Gaza Strip, without any role inside the Strip or interference in its internal affairs.”
He called on mediators, particularly the United States as the main guarantor of the agreement, to pressure Israel to implement the ceasefire and prevent its collapse.
Al-Hayya confirmed that the head of Hamas’s weapons production had been killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza a day earlier.
“The Palestinian people are currently going through difficult times and suffering greatly... with the martyrdom of more than 70,000 people, the latest of whom was the mujahid commander Raed Saad and his companions,” he noted.
On internal Palestinian politics, Al-Hayya called for unity among Palestinian factions and the creation of a unified national leadership to pursue self-determination and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.
He said the release of Palestinians held in Israeli jails remains a priority for Hamas and other resistance groups, alongside efforts to improve detainees’ conditions and end what he described as criminal practices against them, “on the path to their full liberation.”
Addressing the humanitarian situation in Gaza, Al-Hayya called for intensified relief efforts and measures to prevent further humanitarian crises, citing recent severe weather that worsened living conditions in the enclave.
He also accused Israel of accelerating land seizures in the occupied West Bank, saying that “the Zionist enemy is rushing to impose its project of land seizure amid the silence of the international community.”
Al-Hayya called for “pursuing the occupation legally, isolating it politically and prosecuting its leaders before international courts for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Palestinian people and the peoples of the region.”
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