Seven years after the United States declared Hamza bin Laden dead, the son of Osama bin Laden has suddenly reappeared on screen.

Al-Qaeda's official media wing, As-Sahab, released a roughly 50-minute propaganda film marking 25 years since the September 11 attacks. Titled “A Quarter Century of the 11 September Raids,” the video contains previously unseen footage of Hamza, once viewed as a possible successor to his father. He appears seated against a cracked wall wearing a white turban, with a rifle beside him, and speaks about what he describes as a war against Islam.

The timing immediately attracted attention. Hamza was not supposed to be part of al-Qaeda's future. In September 2019, the White House announced that he had been killed in a U.S. counterterrorism operation somewhere in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Donald Trump said at the time that Hamza's death deprived al-Qaeda not only of an important leader but also of the symbolic connection provided by the bin Laden name.

Before his reported death, Washington had considered Hamza important enough to offer a reward of up to $1 million for information leading to his location. The State Department designated him a global terrorist in 2017 after he called for attacks in Western capitals and threatened revenge against the United States for the killing of his father. Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. Navy SEALs in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011.

But al-Qaeda itself never publicly acknowledged Hamza's death or issued the kind of funeral eulogy it has historically used for senior figures. Then, in 2024, unconfirmed reports emerged claiming that Hamza was still alive and possibly operating from Afghanistan. Those reports were never independently established, and the latest video does not settle the question either. There is no publicly verified date for when the Hamza footage was recorded. It could have been filmed years before the U.S. said he was killed.

That makes the decision to release it now arguably more interesting than the footage itself.

Al-Qaeda chose the 25th anniversary of 9/11 to bring the bin Laden name back into its propaganda. The film also contains previously unseen material involving Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama's successor, who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Kabul in 2022. Reports say the video promotes ideas associated with Saif al-Adel, the veteran Egyptian militant widely believed to be al-Qaeda's de facto leader today.

The organisation Hamza would theoretically return to is very different from the one his father commanded. Al-Qaeda no longer operates primarily as a tightly controlled organisation centred on Afghanistan. Years of U.S. counterterrorism operations, leadership losses and competition from Islamic State weakened its central command. But the network survived by becoming more decentralised. Al-Qaeda-aligned organisations remain influential in Somalia and the Sahel, while the group retains relationships with militant networks in South Asia. A recent U.N. assessment said al-Qaeda's appetite for external operations remained undiminished.

For al-Qaeda, Hamza represents something few of its surviving leaders can offer: a direct bloodline to the man whose name became synonymous with the organisation. Whether Hamza is alive or dead only time will tell.