Hamas may make peace with Israel: Haniyeh

Israel dismissed the comments as doubletalk.

Asked in an interview with CBS News aired Thursday if he could foresee a day when he would be invited to sign a peace agreement with Israel, Ismail Haniyeh replied: "Let's hope so."

But Hamas, which won Palestinian parliamentary elections in a landslide in January, has rebuffed Israel's conditions for talks, namely, that the group disarm and recognise the Jewish state's right to exist.

Haniyeh told CBS that Hamas wouldn't meet those conditions for talks unless Israel "recognised a Palestinian state within the boundaries of Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem."

Israel, while accepting the principle of an independent Palestinian state, has said many times that it has no intention of returning to the borders it held before capturing those territories in the 1967 Middle East war.

Haniyeh is considered a pragmatist, but he does not call the shots in the Palestinian government. Major Hamas decisions are taken in secret by a group of leaders inside and outside Gaza and the West Bank.