According to a member of the group’s Politburo, Khalil al-Hayya, who lives in Doha, the massacres committed by Hamas in Israel on October 7 were supposed to attract the attention of the whole world, and not least the Arab countries, to the Palestinian issue. who, according to him, gradually began to forget about it.
“What could change the equation was a great act, and without a doubt, it was known that the reaction to this great act would be big” he says. But, he added, “We had to tell people that the Palestinian cause will not die.”
According Hamas' senior officials, the group's goal is not to improve living conditions in Gaza. In al-Hayya's words:
Hamas’s goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such. Hamas, the Qassam and the resistance woke the world up from its deep sleep and showed that this issue must remain on the table. This battle was not because we wanted fuel or laborers. It did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation.
Instead Hamas seeks to create a permanent conflict. As Hamas media adviser Taher El-Nunu told the newspaper
I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us.
Thousands have been killed in Gaza since the October 7th massacre. But, the New York Times concludes,
[In] the bloody arithmetic of Hamas’s leaders, the carnage is not the regrettable outcome of a big miscalculation. Quite the opposite, they say: It is the necessary cost of a great accomplishment — the shattering of the status quo and the opening of a new, more volatile chapter in their fight against Israel.
Thus, for instance, Ghazi Hamad, another senior Hamas official, says (in a different interview though):
Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.