Hamas's narrative of the war in Gaza; the war will continue because the leaders of Hamas believe that they are winning.
from WaPo:
Hamas has its own narrative, too. The group, listed as a terrorist organization by the United States, casts itself at the heart of the resistance to Israeli occupation and says it successfully blew up the status quo that surrounded the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the frozen peace process between both sides. In April, even as the group faced major losses to its armed wing and the hideous toll exacted on Gaza’s civilians grew, Khaled Meshal, one of Hamas’s leaders in exile, told an audience in Qatar that his faction was further down “the path of liberating Palestine and defeating the Zionist project.”
Meshal was speaking in the wake of an Israeli airstrike that killed some family members of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh. The incident apparently elicited a similar reaction from Yehiya Sinwar, the shadowy Hamas leader within Gaza who is considered to be one of the masterminds of the Oct. 7 attack. In an April 11 message to Haniyeh, Sinwar allegedly told his colleague that the loss of his sons and other Palestinians during the war would “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honor.”
The details of Sinwar’s correspondence were reported Tuesday by the Wall Street Journal, which obtained dozens of messages he reportedly relayed to cease-fire negotiators, Hamas officials and others outside of Gaza. (The Washington Post was unable to independently verify the Journal’s reporting.)
“We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Sinwar said in a recent message, according to the Journal, to Hamas officials working to broker an agreement with Qatari and Egyptian officials. The inference here, the Journal noted, was that Sinwar believed further Israeli hostilities and mounting Palestinian casualties played into his organization’s hands. In a separate message, he likened the loss of Palestinian lives in Gaza to the death tolls in other revolutionary conflicts, including Algeria’s war for independence. He said that “these are necessary sacrifices.”
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