Khaled Meshaal, the head of Palestinian Hamas movement, on Saturday said that Ismail Haniya, a former leader of the group in the Gaza Strip, was elected as his successor.
Haniyeh's election came days after Hamas published a new political manifesto, rebranding itself as a Palestinian national movement and distancing itself from the Brotherhood, which has been outlawed by Egypt.
Hamas, which governs in the Gaza Strip, violently wrested power there in 2007 from the second-largest Palestinian movement, President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party, which now controls only the West Bank.
"He is also a moderate politician", he said, expecting the new Hamas leader would seek to bolster the group's relations with Sunni Arab countries.
For his first appearance as Hamas leader, Haniyeh chose a symbol of elusive Palestinian unity - a solidarity tent where several political factions are represented, including Hamas and Mr Abbas' Fatah movement.
Reports about the Palestinian group Hamas accepting a Palestinian state are "fake news", according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a video posted Sunday.
Hamas officials said the revised document in no way amounts to recognition of Israel as demanded by the worldwide community. "Today, we announced it clearly and informatively", Haniyeh said of the new policy document.
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In the charter, Hamas fell short of recognising Israel. The 1988 charter was condemned for its anti-Jewish language. Human Rights Watch has been unrelenting in its charges that Hamas has engaged in war crimes against Israeli and Palestinian civilians.
The Gaza border authority said on Saturday that "more than 20,000 Palestinian citizens, who are considered humanitarian cases, are stuck in Gaza and desperately need to travel abroad" for treatment. Israel and Egypt imposed a border blockade on Gaza after the Hamas takeover a decade ago, keeping the territory's borders sealed most of the time.
Shortly after the document's release, Meshaal gave an interview to CNN from Doha, Qatar in which the exiled Palestinian leader issued a "plea" to US President Donald Trump to reject the "wrong approaches of the past" concerning Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
In his debut speech following his election as the Islamic Resistance Movement's top official, Haniyeh said that working for the sake of the prisoners has run very deep within Hamas, and still does.
The contrast between the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) own evolution from the 1970s onward, and Hamas' apparent shift toward moderation, can not be ignored.
It also says its struggle is not against Jews due to their religion but against Israel as an occupier. Haniyeh's administration resigned in 2014, as part of a deal with Fatah to set up a transitional government for both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
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