The future of the Gaza Strip is hanging in the balance as Hamas prepares to elect its first political leader since the death of Yahya Sinwar, a decision which could alter the future direction of the Palestinian militant group and the wider Middle East.

Depleted but still operational after more than two years of war with Israel, Hamas has been holding a highly secretive internal ballot to decide who will run its political wing for the past several weeks. Their decision has long been delayed by Israel’s invasion and bombardment of the enclave, which has brutalised its civilian population.

There have been briefings to suggest that a new leader has now been chosen – but it is unclear if and when Hamas will formally announce the identity of their new leader.

One report in Egyptian newspaper Al Manassa states that Khalil al-Hayya, a Gaza-born close associate of Sinwar, has won the leadership after securing 65 per cent of the vote.

But Khaled Mashal, a long-serving Qatar-based member of Hamas’s politburo, who served as its leader for two decades from 1996 to 2017 – when he was succeeded by the late Ismail Haniyeh – is reported by others to have won the ballot, experts say.

Moderates against hawks – but is it that simple?

The election has been presented by Western media as a choice between a more moderate Mashal and the hawkish Al-Hayya. Zaher Jabarin, the leader of Hamas in the West Bank, was also reportedly a candidate. The trio are now based in Doha, and currently share the title of acting chairman of the Hamas political bureau.

Peace talks between Hamas and Israel appear have hit a wall, despite a ceasefire agreement in October 2025. Hundreds have been killed by Israeli fire in Gaza since the ceasefire began, and its military has continued creeping forward from the agreed “yellow line”, which was intended to demarcate the boundaries of its partial control in the strip.

Mashal, born in the West Bank, is believed to be more open to working with the Palestinian Authority (PA) and holds close diplomatic ties with Turkey and Qatar. Al-Hayya serves as the de facto leader of the Gaza Strip and is one of the group’s chief negotiators.

“[Al-Hayya] also lost two sons in the war,” says Dr Yaniv Voller, an expert in internal Palestinian politics at the University of Kent. “He is also reportedly closer to Iran, which might indicate a stronger inclination to resume the armed struggle.”

Michael Milshtein, an expert on Hamas at Tel Aviv University, said it is “far more important to continue developing the issue of control in Gaza and the matter of [military] rebuilding.”

Dr Rob Geist Pinfold, an expert on the region at King’s College London, says his understanding is that Mashal, Al-Hayya, and Jabarin have been elected into senior roles, with Mashal at the helm.

If this selection is confirmed, it would suggest the elections have served only as a “rubber stamp” for the existing balance of power, with the trio taking on “different portfolios with Mashal as the leader”.

The Western tendency to view the Hamas election as a choice between hawks and moderates, he says, does not reflect the more complex reality of Hamas’ internal politics.

“Both those groups have different reasons to be moderate or extreme. So the Doha group is the diplomats; they’re the ones who have relations with world leaders, including talking with the US, so we often see them as moderates for that reason. However, they are also prone to bombastic rhetoric, they have less of a need to worry about their domestic constituency,” he says.

The military wing in Gaza, known as the al-Qassam Brigades, are viewed as more hardline given their active role in pushing for the 7 October attacks.

“At the same time, they also have a reason to be more pragmatic in that they have a domestic constituency and domestic base to answer to, with more than 90 per cent of Gazans still under Hamas rule,” Dr Pinfold explains.

Will Hamas change its approach to controlling Gaza?

In the absence of any truly reformist candidates, there is little prospect of any kind of wholesale change in Hamas’ approach to controlling Gaza and how it projects power internationally.

There are growing concerns, however, about the possibility of the group’s influence in the West Bank increasing despite the reelection of Mahmoud Abbas as leader of Fatah. As one of the world’s oldest leaders at 90 years old, he is under mounting pressure to implement reforms and tackle accusations of corruption.

“Succession battles are beginning to take place,” says Dr Voller. “Hamas is more popular in the West Bank than it is in Gaza and the situation there seems to be spiralling toward instability, partly also because of the intensifying settler violence.”

On Thursday, Abbas reiterated pledges to reform the PA and hold long-delayed presidential and parliamentary elections during the Fatah party conference this week.

“We renew our full commitment to continuing work on implementing all the reform measures we pledged,” Abbas said, although he failed to produce a timeline for the elections.

Dr Voller says that the PA “should and could play an important role in Gaza’s reconstruction” warning that its “collapse into internal rivalries could have an even more detrimental impact on the lives of Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank”.

Call them mom and dad — Alex Cooper and Matt Kaplan are expecting their first baby together.

The Call Her Daddy podcast host, 31, shared pictures Sunday showing off her pregnancy bump with Kaplan, 42, as she simply wrote, “Our family.”

Cooper and Kaplan tied the knot in Mexico in April 2024 after they met on a Zoom call during the Covid-19 pandemic in July 2020.

The pregnancy announcement comes weeks after unfounded reports by the Daily Mail that they were having marital problems.

However, they walked the red carpet together at last week’s 2026 YouTube Upfront.

Both Cooper and Kaplan, a film producer, have been facing career drama in recent months.

Last month, a bombshell report accused Kaplan of berating and threatening workers at his and Cooper’s production company, Unwell Network.

Unwell Network has reportedly faced employee turnover due to a toxic work environment fostered by Kaplan, who works as the company’s the co-chief executive officer.

Cooper and Kaplan co-founded their company Trending Media in 2023, which is the parent company for the Unwell Network. Unwell includes Cooper’s lifestyle podcasts and Kaplan’s own production company, ACE Entertainment.

Kaplan is said to be running the day-to-day operations of the business while Cooper focuses on her extremely popular podcast.

Company insiders told Bloomberg that Kaplan has allegedly “earned a reputation for frequently yelling at staff members” and threatening to blacklist them from other jobs, the outlet reported.

Some employees have reportedly threatened to quit the network while working on film sets and live tours due to his behavior.

Meanwhile, Cooper has raised speculation about the working environment of her own podcast due to her apparent feud with Alix Earle.

The conflict went public last month when Cooper shared a video after Coachella weekend where she called out Earle, 25, by name.

“You guys know I don’t usually address this kind of stuff because it feels like a waste of time,” Cooper said in the video. “And honestly, it’s embarrassing to participate in this. But I am obviously seeing the videos and I’m getting tagged. I see the DMs, I see the comments. So, at this point, it just feels long overdue.”

She then paused and said, ““Alix Earle, hey girl. The passive-aggressive reposts and the ‘likes’ and the commenting on things, I gotta call you out here — you’re gonna need to get specific. Just say what you gotta say about me. There’s no NDA and no one is stopping you. Stop hiding behind other people and just say it yourself. What’s the beef?”

Earle responded with a quick comment on the video: “Okay on it!!”

Cooper’s video came days after Earle had reposted a TikTok video accusing Cooper of exploiting her podcast guests for tell-all interviews.

Earle and Cooper were previously on good terms. Earle was one of the first podcasts to launch under Unwell Network in September 2023.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Even as Democratic officials fight the effort in court, the Trump administration has run millions of voter registrations through government databases to determine their eligibility in a process that critics worry could end up purging valid voters from the rolls before the November elections.

At least 67 million registrations, primarily from Republican-controlled states, have gone through a beefed-up verification program at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and tens of thousands of those have been flagged as potential noncitizens or people who have died. Some states allow only a month for people to prove their eligibility and others suspend it immediately.

The scanning of state voter rolls at the national level is part of a broader effort by Republican President Donald Trump to federalize certain election functions and promote his messaging that elections are marred by noncitizen voting, even though instances of that are rare. Voting and civil rights advocates say the DHS system is error-prone and can mistakenly flag people who are eligible to vote.

“If a voter is wrongly removed, by the time they learn about it and correct it, they may miss their opportunity to vote in that election,” said Freda Levenson, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. The group is challenging an Ohio law requiring monthly checks with the DHS system.

Voters such as 29-year-old Anthony Nel have been caught in the middle.

The native of South Africa, who became a citizen more than a decade ago, was flagged as a potential noncitizen when Texas ran its voter file through the DHS verification system. Nel’s local election office in Denton, north of Dallas, temporarily canceled his registration last fall while he was waiting for a new passport to replace an expired one.

“I’m like, ‘You should know that I’m a citizen, that the passport exists,’” he said in an interview.

States’ entire voter rolls reviewed

Trump has been trying to overhaul U.S. elections, including calling for a federal list of verified voters, and his Department of Justice has pushed states to hand over unredacted voter information for mass checks through the DHS program known as SAVE.

The Justice Department has sued states that refuse, saying the government is trying to ensure that they are complying with federal law and have accurate voter lists. States already take a number of steps to maintain the accuracy of their voter rolls.

SAVE, short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, was created under an immigration law mandating that DHS help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an arm of DHS, said more than 1,300 agencies use it.

At least 25 states have used SAVE to check their voter rolls since April 2025, after the Trump administration significantly expanded its search abilities, and 60 million registrations were checked in a year’s time, according to Citizenship and Immigration Services. That figure does not include an additional 7.4 million registrations from North Carolina, where Republicans control the state election board, that were recently run through the system.

Citizenship and Immigration Services said in an emailed statement that it is “committed to helping eliminate voter fraud” to restore Americans’ trust in their elections.

“SAVE is one of the most important tools states have to verify voter information,” Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican, recently told a U.S. House committee examining how states keep voter rolls clean.

Schwab’s endorsement is notable because he once was publicly skeptical that noncitizens represented a significant voter fraud threat.

Republicans cite hits from SAVE searches

Citizenship and Immigration Services said the 60 million voter registration checks identified about 24,000 potential noncitizens. U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said during a recent Fox News interview that those checks also identified about 350,000 people who appear to have died.

North Carolina’s State Board of Elections said its check had identified another 34,000 registered voters who are potentially deceased.

Even if all those eventually were verified as ineligible, they would represent small percentages of total registered voters. The figure for noncitizens would be about 400 for every 1 million registrations. Some 384,000 people identified as potentially deceased in about 67 million registrations is a fraction of 1%.

Some voters have been mistakenly flagged.

In Dallas, election officials recently canceled the registration of Domingo Garcia, a 68-year-old lawyer and voting rights activist, without explanation. He has been voting regularly for 50 years, most recently in the state’s March 3 primary, and suspects that officials concluded he was deceased.

“I should not have been on any lists,” he said.

False positives are popping up

Voting rights advocates have filed at least six federal lawsuits over SAVE checks, either against the Trump administration or states using the program.

Nel, a 29-year-old college administrator, is a plaintiff in one of them, filed recently in the District of Columbia against the Justice Department. It alleges an “illegal and unprecedented quest” by the administration for “millions of Americans’ confidential voter data.”

Lawyers also argue that eligible voters will be disenfranchised by hits from outdated or incomplete data.

Nel came to the United States from South Africa with his parents at age 8. His parents became citizens when he was 16, making him a citizen, as well. He said he has voted regularly since he was 18.

Yet he received a letter in October in a white envelope that looked to him like junk mail. It told him he had been identified as a potential noncitizen through a SAVE check of Texas’ 18 million voter registrations. He had 30 days to prove otherwise — a deadline he missed because of the time it took to get a new passport.

“It’s clear that this process that they’ve put into place for this doesn’t work,” he said.

Defenders say the SAVE system is a first step

Republican officials said the administration does not portray SAVE searches as foolproof. Instead, it identifies registrations that should be further investigated, they said.

In Kansas, Schwab’s office is still investigating its list of flagged registrations and has yet to disclose the number of hits of potentially ineligible voters from a SAVE check of the state’s 2 million registrations.

Once his office forwards flagged names to county officials, a state law enacted this year requires them to list the registrations as “in suspense” or “pending” until the cases are resolved. A flagged person still can vote, but the ballot is set aside for further review and might not be counted.

Texas is supposed to give people with flagged registrations 30 days to prove they are properly registered. North Carolina will require county elections boards to give people whose registrations are challenged a hearing before they can be canceled.

A new Ohio law requires local election boards to “promptly” cancel the registrations of people whom the secretary of state identifies as noncitizens during registration checks that the official is required to make at least monthly.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, said in an email that people’s voting rights are not in danger because “all they need to do to immediately restore their registration status is show proof of citizenship.”

But Levenson, the ACLU lawyer, described the approach differently.

“Shoot first and ask questions later,” she said.

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Associated Press writers Jack Dura in Bismarck, North Dakota, and Gary Robertson, in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed to this report.