Hamas's leaders admitted to the New York Times that their goal is to wage war on Israel and not to bring prosperity such as "water and electricity" to Gaza.
"Hamas’s goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such," Khalil al-Hayya, who serves in Hamas's top leadership body, told the Times in an interview published Wednesday. "Hamas, the Qassam, and the resistance woke the world up from its deep sleep and showed that this issue must remain on the table."
He added that Hamas did not launch its terrorist attack on Israel last month in order to gain supplies or "improve" Gazans' situation.
"It did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza," al-Hayya said. "This battle is to completely overthrow the situation."
Hamas media adviser Taher El-Nounou said the group hoped that the war between Israel and Hamas, which began after the terrorist group killed about 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians, on Oct. 7, would be "permanent."
"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," El-Nounou told the Times.
The leaders' statements give evidence to the claims of Israel and its supporters that Hamas is less interested in caring for the people of Gaza than it is in waging war on the Jewish state.
Last month, a senior Hamas official admitted in an interview that even though the terrorist group has built hundreds of miles of tunnels under Gaza, Hamas is uninterested in building shelters for Gazan civilians.
"It is the job of the United Nations to protect them," said Mousa Abu Marzouk, a Hamas political leader. "We have built the tunnels because we have no other way of protecting ourselves from being targeted and killed. These tunnels are meant to protect us from the airplanes. We are fighting from inside the tunnels."
Noa Cochva, the reigning Miss Israel, cut a video late last month in which she argued that Hamas is solely to blame for the plight of Gazan civilians.
"Anyone who claims there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza is right," Cochva said. "But think about it. Who's to blame that there is no food, no medicine, only rockets? There is only one to blame: Hamas, not Israel. It's not 'Free Palestine.' It's 'Free Palestine from Hamas.' Hamas is ISIS."