GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- Hamas leaders yesterday concluded their maiden political campaign with a defiant embrace of the militant group's core tenets, vowing to continue their armed struggle until Palestinians rule what is now Israel, denouncing all economic ties with the Jewish state, and declaring peace negotiations ''a failed process."

As Hamas surged in the polls in recent days to a virtual dead heat with the front-running Fatah party in tomorrow's elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council, some Hamas leaders had floated more conciliatory ideas to attract broader support, including a new willingness to consider talking to Israel.

But leaders of Fatah, the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority, staged a counteroffensive, declaring that Hamas's belated plunge into the political arena proves that Fatah's more pragmatic approach to Israel is the right one.

So Mahmoud Zahar, a top Hamas leader, struck back in the campaign's final days, playing to Hamas's political base in the destitute Gaza neighborhoods and refugee camps that have supplied many Hamas suicide attackers and that revere them as martyrs. Before crowds of thousands, he and other candidates went out of their way to deny they would ever give up their insistence on the destruction of Israel and the right to armed struggle...