ONE objective burnt deep in the heart and mind of Mohammed Farhat when, rifle in hand, he attacked a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip: to kill as many Israelis as possible.

The 17-year-old Palestinian dispatched five settlers before being shot dead. In later military operations his two brothers were killed by the Israelis, who also tried to blow up the Farhats’ home.

Today, with the intifada in Gaza and the West Bank over and Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip completed, Mariam Farhat, the mother of the three dead youths, insists that the struggle must go on. But this time she has chosen the ballot box over the bullet.

Across the Arab world the 56-year-old mother is an icon of the resistance as she campaigns in Gaza as a candidate for the Islamic militant group Hamas in Palestinian parliamentary elections on January 25.

Hamas has been the deadliest of the Palestinian militant groups. It has always stood for the obliteration of the Jewish state and was responsible for suicide bombings that have killed hundreds of Israelis over the past five years.

Farhat still mourns her sons. Nidal, her eldest, was killed in 2003 while preparing an attack and Rawad was blown up last year in an Israeli airstrike on his car, which was laden with rockets.

The mother regards her candidacy for the Palestinian Legislative Council as a logical extension of the armed struggle she encouraged her sons to die for. She denies that Hamas’s decision to join mainstream Palestinian political life contradicts its military goals.

“The jihadist project completes the political one and the political project cannot be completed without jihad,” she says. “The resistance needs the political project to support it through the legislative council.”

The Israelis consider her an enemy, pointing to a video in which she is seen grasping Mohammed’s rifle and advising him on tactics before his attack on the Gaza settlement.

In Israel, where Hamas still arouses hostility and suspicion, Farhat’s candidacy is seen as an indication that, while embracing a political role, it remains the same unreconstructed terrorist organisation that sent suicide bombers into Israeli cafes and onto buses.

On Thursday, Ehud Olmert, who has been the acting Israeli prime minister since Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke on January 4, expressed fears that a strong Hamas showing in the election would give legitimacy to terrorists. “There can be no progress with an administration in which there are terrorist organisations as members,” said an aide.

But Alvaro de Soto, the United Nations peace envoy to the Middle East, welcomed an election with Hamas’s participation, calling it “a step towards Palestinian democratic statehood”.

Hamas’s 1988 charter specifically calls for the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic Palestinian state in its place. But UN officials noted that the party did not include this demand in its election manifesto last week.

Although Mahmoud Zahar, the Hamas leader in Gaza, said there was no possibility that it would enter negotiations with Israel or disarm, other Palestinians have detected increasing ambiguity in leaders’ statements as the group begins to shift away from the extremes of Palestinian politics towards the centre.

The process of redefinition, they say, has been stunningly swift as Hamas has transformed itself into a potent fighting force on the campaign trail. It has organised huge rallies across Gaza, door-to-door electioneering and a sophisticated media campaign including mobile phone messages and e-mails, and has set up its own television channel.

Its campaign manager is Naje al-Serhay, a slick, tweed-jacketed professional. Yet the ringtone on his mobile phone is a burst of gunfire, perhaps a warning of the violence that could erupt amid any post-election power struggle between Hamas and militias such as the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, linked to the ruling Fatah organisation.

If recent opinion polls are any guide, Hamas is going to do extremely well on Wednesday next week. Some polls suggest it will win as many as 40% of the 132 legislative council seats, securing a stake in the new Palestinian cabinet and weakening the decades-old grip of Fatah, which was founded by the late Yasser Arafat and is now led by Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority.

Even Saeb Erekat, the chief negotiator with Israel and one of Fatah’s most easily recognisable leaders, is not guaranteed re-election thanks to a vigorous challenge by Hamas in Jericho.

The appeal of Hamas is easy to see in the dusty, teeming streets of Gaza, where the election campaign has been taking place against a background of lawlessness and chaos, including the brief kidnapping of westerners such as Kate Burton, the British peace activist.

Hamas’s rising popularity is built partly on a campaign against Fatah’s corruption and failure to control crime, and partly on the credit the group claims for driving Israeli settlers out of Gaza through its armed operations.

Hamas has been campaigning under the banner of “change and reform”. Fatah is polarised and immersed in turmoil. Some in Gaza warn of serious violence between their militias if Zahar makes good his threat to put corrupt Fatah officials on trial.

A muscular Hamas performance at the polls would also be a challenge to both Israel and America, which condemn it as a terrorist organisation. There is a risk the Palestinians will lose some significant western funding.

Farhat’s immediate concerns are closer to home, where she has put pictures of her three dead sons on the wall along with a photograph of her cradling a rifle.

She has three other sons who are prepared to take up armed struggle. If the election proves to be a step towards a Middle East peace, it could save them from their brothers’ fate.

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