These are the final days of Khaled Meshaal’s leadership of the Hamas political bureau. Meshaal’s influence in the movement has been declining ever since he bet on the wrong horse and moved from Damascus to Qatar, where he did not find the support he had hoped for. Now his downfall is apparently about to be official and final.

The Meshaal era in the Hamas movement is coming to an end with a whimper. The London-based Al Wattan newspaper reported June 13 that the movement’s leader informed his associates in Qatar, where he has been living since leaving Syria and falling out with Iran, that he had decided not to run in the year-end elections for leadership of the political bureau and Hamas' decision-making body, the Shura Council.

About a year before Hamas' last internal elections in April 2013, Meshaal had considered stepping down and even announced at one point that he wouldn't run. He feared that Hamas' military wing in Gaza, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, would torpedo his campaign. But after Israel’s November 2012 assassination of al-Qassam Brigades leader Ahmed Jabari and Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense that followed, Meshaal came to Gaza and started rebuilding his status. He delivered a “victory speech” in the Square of the Unknown Soldier in Gaza City and announced that he would heed the call of the movement and continue to lead its political bureau.

This time, given his current standing in Qatar and the grim circumstances of Hamas, Meshaal understands it’s over. Even if, by some miracle, he manages to overcome the forces and currents arrayed against him in the deeply divided movement, there’s no way he will be able to extricate Hamas from the quagmire in which it is sunk.