But he didn’t exactly rise to the top through a hotly contested election. The war has decimated Hamas’s top ranks. Of the 18 senior figures on the group’s military council before the war, only a few are thought to still be alive. Mohammed Sinwar, Haddad’s immediate predecessor and Yahya’s younger brother, was killed in May during an Israeli strike beneath Khan Younis’s European Hospital. Haddad survived—and took over.