THE POLITICAL BUREAU
Khaled Mashaal headed Hamas’s Political Bureau, the organization’s principal authority or executive branch, from 2004 until 2017. Former head of Hamas government in Gaza, Esmael Haniya, was elected in May 2017 to head the Political Bureau. Members of the political bureau are all elected by the movement’s Shura Council. The Bureau has fifteen members in Gaza Strip alone. It has several units, including a finance, a propaganda, foreign affairs and social welfare departments. The Political Bureau has four sections in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Israeli prisons and abroad. The general political bureau is composed of representatives from the four bureaus, 18 members in total. The head of the political bureau is also elected every four years.The Bureau suffers from divisions due to differences between Gazans led by second-in-command Mousa Abu Marzouk, who is based in Cairo, Egypt, and the so-called Kuwaidia group, composed of West Bankers who have studied or worked in Kuwait, led by Khaled Mashal. Both groups work tightly together but Marzouk’s faction repeatedly criticized the Kuwaiti group because of its tendency to dominate key positions within Hamas’s Political Bureau.
