The tea cup stops short of his lip, as Khalid Mishal pauses to consider the ironies of trench warfare in the Middle East: a lurch to the political right has anointed as Israel's next prime minister the man who, 11 years ago, sent Mossad agents on a bizarre mission to assassinate Mishal.

In September 1997, Benjamin Netanyahu was prime minister of Israel, an office to which he is expected to return in the coming days. The intended victim of this James-Bond-becomes-Beagle-Boys plot was Mishal. Back then the thick-set Mishal was a mid-level operative in Hamas - but today he heads the Islamist resistance movement from a heavily guarded lair in Damascus.

It is late on Wednesday evening and Mishal sits deep in a plump armchair, in a second-floor reception room. "Netanyahu," he says, returning to his cup of tea. "It's fate, God's destiny, but we can't set policy on the basis of personal grudges."

The Palestinian resistance leader, whose suicide bombers and assassins have taken their own toll on Israeli life over the years, then declares his would-be-killer to be a man of straw.

"We've already experienced Netanyahu as prime minister of Israel, so Palestinians are not afraid of him second time round," Mishal vouches.

"After the battle of Gaza [in December-January] and the steadfastness of our people in the face of the Zionist war machine, do you expect a single Palestinian to be scared of this man? It doesn't matter if he tries again to kill me, because he has already killed my people."

Set against a scrabbly hillside at the back of a secure enclave that is reserved for high officials of the Syrian regime, foreign diplomats and NGO staff, Mishal's Damascus bunker is an unmarked, nondescript apartment block that doubles as jihad headquarters and family home.

Festooned with swivelling security cameras, it also is watched over by an outer ring of leather-jacketed security men who juggle firearms and walkie-talkies as they prowl the pavement. A Hamas car collects select visitors from city hotels - by prior arrangement.

When discretion is needed, one of a fleet of heavy, black Mercedes-Benz sedans is wheeled out - black curtains are drawn behind the tinted glass.

When greater discretion is required, the driver jumps the car on to the pavement, easing to a halt under an outstretched awning that hangs from the perimeter wall. The house guards, moving with practised precision, then seize the loose ends of two bunched canvas flaps suspended from the awning and draw them quickly out to the edge of the pavement, enveloping the vehicle before some of Mishal's more mysterious callers dare to alight.

The arrival of an outsider is an emergency event for Mishal's suit-and-tied inner security ring. These men frequently speak into microphones concealed in the cuff of their jacket sleeve. Their thoroughness reveals an understanding that their boss is a constant target for a determined enemy.

Beyond an airport-like, walk-through security machine and up dog-legged stairs, a heavy, double-bolted door leads into a hallway, from which a visitor is escorted through a set of double doors into Mishal's diwan, or meeting place.

Armchairs line the long walls and the decor is various shades of Hamas green. But it is a wall of mostly gaunt faces that locks the attention of visitors upon entering; arranged in a honeycomb pattern, they are 20 Hamas leaders, fighters and bomb-makers, all victims of Israel's campaign of targeted assassination.

Holding forth expansively, the Hamas leader negotiates the tripwires of the diplomatic and political minefields that he inhabits daily, with certainty and a confidence that verges on bombast, as he lectures a fast-changing world on how it should respond to his movement - not the reverse.

Did he have any regrets about the extent of the damage Israeli forces inflicted on Gaza in December-January - about 1300 Palestinians dead, thousands injured and thousands of homes and other buildings damaged and destroyed? The assault came after Hamas refused to renegotiate a truce, on the grounds that Israel had consistently violated what Hamas understood to be the terms of the six-month ceasefire.

Reminded that the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, had publicly acknowledged that had he known the ferocity of the Israeli retaliation when it invaded Lebanon after the abduction of three Israeli soldiers in 2006, he would not have taken the soldiers, Mishal insists that Gaza and Hamas are different cases.

"The 2006 captures were an option, a choice for Hezbollah, so they are entitled to assess the validity of what they did in terms of the consequences for Lebanon," he says. "But for the Palestinians, Gaza wasn't a question of choice.

"Israel was supposed to end the siege and open the border crossings in return for a halt to the rockets; the rockets stopped, but the siege remained and the crossings stayed closed. It's unfair to ask Palestinians if they want to die slowly under siege or quickly under fire."

On Wednesday, Mishal's visitors include parliamentary delegations from Greece and Italy. They came from the British and European parliaments a few days before that. The MPs now come in a wave of publicity, but the trailblazers came earlier: analysts from American and European think tanks who decided the time had come to make discreet efforts to understand the Hamas mindset.

These are small, non-governmental delegations. But they are signs of different times for Hamas, of feelers being extended from corners of the world that until now have gone along with the US-led campaign to keep Hamas in a deep freeze.

And they are in marked contrast to the cold shoulder Israel is feeling around the world in the aftermath of its ferocious assault on Gaza, a chill that is billed in Israel as the country's worst diplomatic crisis in two decades.

As Israel increases the budget allocation for its global image-making program, Hamas is buoyed by confirmation from Britain that, notwithstanding consternation in Washington, it has eased its isolation of Hamas's counterpart in Lebanon, Hezbollah, by agreeing to talk to its political wing.

London said the move was justified because Hezbollah has joined a government of national unity. Given that national unity talks are on foot in the Occupied Territories, an argument is being formulated in Hamas that it should be granted the same dispensation by London.

France, too, has intimated a willingness to open dialogue with Hamas and a growing army of former government officials and peace negotiators is urging that Hamas be given a seat at the table. Led by the former US president Jimmy Carter, who visited Mishal in Damascus, it includes the likes of the former British prime minister Tony Bair and the former Australian foreign affairs minister Gareth Evans.

Despite, or perhaps because of the carnage in Gaza, the mood in the Hamas bunker is upbeat; support for the Islamist movement among Palestinians rose dramatically after the January hostility, just as it fell for the US-backed Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, and his feeble Fatah faction, whose writ is confined to the West Bank.

"More and more, the US and Israel and others in their camp understand that they cannot implement their agenda against us - because of the strength that we have acquired," Mishal says through an interpreter. "Netanyahu destroyed the peace process the last time he was prime minister and his plan now for Palestinians to have just economic independence will fail, too."

Pressed on what policy changes Hamas might make as a gesture to the new regional order demanded by Hamas, Mishal offers little, arguing: "Hamas has already changed - we accepted the national accords for a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders and we took part in the 2006 Palestinian elections.

"But where is the response by Washington and the others? All we got was hostility and negativity [when we won the election]."

Mishal claims to be untroubled by the prospect of negative outcomes for Hamas as a result of Washington's efforts to reach out to Iran and Syria.

"We're not worried," he says. "Hamas is not a card in anyone's hand. We play an effective role, even in times of dramatic change. Nothing is going to happen in this region until the Palestinian issue is properly addressed - and many countries in the region, including Iran and Syria, hold a principled commitment to the Palestinian cause."

Much as he welcomes the election of Barack Obama, Mishal refuses to entertain rewriting Hamas' offensive charter, not only as a gesture to a new world order but also to deprive critics of the movement of one of their most potent targets.

In 2005, the movement had appointed a committee to review Hamas's controversial 1988 Charter - with its offensive language, its anti-Semitism, its incitement to battle and its calls for the elimination of the state of Israel. In a costly fit of pique over being consigned to the sin bin by the US and others after its election win, Hamas shelved the review.

Policy changes by Hamas have rendered much of the document redundant. But the continued inclusion of the call for the destruction of Israel has become a vulnerable attack point for Hamas' worldwide army of critics.

Revealing that the pique remains potent, Mishal says: "They didn't give us a chance after we won the election, irrespective of what we might have done."

Will the charter be rewritten?

"Not a chance. The message to us from the world was absolute rejection of the election outcome, because the result was not acceptable to the US and to corrupt elements of the Palestinian community [read Fatah].

"Our approach is not by means of changing the charter, a document written in 1988, but by virtue of our policy program today. Judge us by what we do today - not by what was written more than 20 years ago.

"Hamas has declared its acceptance of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories; we have joined the political process; we have entered short-term truces with Israel - this is the reality that the world needs to deal with. You say people use the charter as a weapon against us - well, let them."

Mishal refuses to accept Israeli claims that it was new demands by Hamas that forced the collapse this week of negotiations to exchange hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel for a single Israeli who was captured almost three years ago: Sergeant Gilad Shalit.

But asked about reports that Hamas wanted freedom for as many as 1400 prisoners, Mishal explains the calculus of the negotiations - from Hamas's perspective.

In the most celebrated exchanged in the past, three Israeli soldiers were swapped, in 1985, for 1150 Palestinians - almost 400 Palestinians for each Israeli.

Asked how Hamas now could demand more than three times that many Palestinians in return for Shalit's freedom, he says: "Israel's prisoner numbers were relatively low in '85 - 1150 would have been most of those they held.

"The number we are seeking for Shalit is only one-tenth of today's number of Palestinians in Israeli jails.

"The Israelis just don't learn. When they refuse to release Palestinians, it forces the Palestinians to resort to other means to gain their release - and inevitably this incudes the capture of more Israeli soldiers."

In this week's interview in Damascus, Mishal recommitted Hamas to the electoral process in the Occupied Territories - despite an Israeli round-up and jailing of more than 30 of Hamas's West Bank MPs in the aftermath of the 2006 election.

This week, Israel rounded up 10 senior Hamas figures in the West Bank, including four MPs it described as "terror operatives" - reportedly in a bid to pressure Hamas to accept Israel's terms in the haggling over Shalit.

Underlying Mishal's analysis is Hamas's determination to avoid what it sees as the pitfalls, for the Palestinian side, of the years that followed the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, the Fatah movement and the Palestine Liberation renounced violence as a weapon and recognised the state of Israel, but achieved little in endless rounds of so-called peace talks as Israel continued to carve up the Occupied Territories to suit its own needs. Since Arafat's death at the end of 2004, his successor Mahmoud Abbas has made no headway either.

Mishal lays out the pieces of the geopolitical puzzle and laughs. Despite Islam's prohibition on gambling, he concludes: "If the Palestinian people were gamblers, they would bet on Hamas."