Hamas leaders told the New York Times on Wednesday that they had no interest in governing Gaza and instead wanted to create a “permanent” state of war against Israel that, in their minds, would mobilize Arab support and keep the Palestinian cause alive.

The idea of governing Gaza well, or building institutions toward creating a Palestinian state, seems not to have occurred to them — nor did the Times‘ Ben Hubbard and Maria Abi-Habib, who had access to Hamas leaders, suggest that more constructive idea.

It was necessary to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash,” Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’s top leadership body, told The New York Times in Doha, Qatar. “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.”

…

“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,” Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told The Times.

…

“This battle was not because we wanted fuel or laborers,” he added. “It did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation.”

The Times presented several Hamas complaints about Israel in euphemistic terms, as if they were accurate or legitimate. For example, it describes Jews trying to pray on the Temple Mount as “Jews openly praying at a contested site customarily reserved for Muslims,” without mentioning that it is also the holiest site in Judaism. The Times also cites “the Israeli police storming the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem,” without noting that they only did so because Hamas and other groups stockpiled weapons there.

Prior to the war, Saudi Arabia and Israel had been moving toward a deal on peace and normalization that would have been conditioned on an improvement of conditions for Palestinians, though not necessarily on the creation of a Palestinian state.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.