Hamas leader plays to win Smash ... a competitive Khalid Mishal plays table tennis with his security staff after his gym routine in Doha. The Doha skyline is like a woman's dressing table - a clutter of gaudy edifices like so many perfume bottles. For a while Hamas chief Khalid Mishal and his team operated from a floor perched high in one of the "bottles" but when he agrees to talk, on a mild evening early last month, his new office is revealed as a villa out in the suburbs. Visitors to the marbled villa that has become the leadership office-in-exile for the Palestinian resistance movement are relieved of all bags and baggage at the door. Some time later, the bags are returned - minus mobile phones. Mishal enters, wearing his signature pale-blue shirt, open-necked under a dark jacket - prompting a realisation that he is never seen in public in the traditional garb of Palestinian men - the dishdasha robe along with the keffiyeh headscarf that the late Yasser Arafat elevated to a global icon. Mishal fingers a set of silver prayer beads and demonstrates an improving grasp of English - insisting that he be interviewed in Arabic but at times taking mischievous delight in quibbling over particular English words chosen by his translator. Aides come and go through hours of interviews - a dish of Arabic sweets or a fruit platter; a mobile phone, with a caller who needs Mishal's ear, then and there; or delivering the handheld buzzer by which Mishal summons them, which he left at an earlier meeting elsewhere in the villa. Signs of this as a new chapter for Hamas abound. The residential setting in the suburbs of Doha is a convivial step up from the bunker in a secured quarter of Damascus that served as his headquarters for more than a decade. Gone are the leather-jacketed Syrian guards with their Kalashnikovs and a makeshift arrangement of a retractable awning and curtains that would totally envelop a car as it pulled up, to protect the identity of Mishal's visitors from prying eyes. Instead, today's visitor observes lithe Qatari women dressed in head-to-toe black gliding by as they take the evening air. Tall gates open automatically for guests to be dropped at the marbled entrance to Mishal's richly carpeted diwan, or meeting place. A phone is brought in and Mishal breaks off to chat warmly - the caller is Walid, the eldest of his sons, a witness to the dramatic but ultimately botched attempt by Israel's Mossad to assassinate Mishal by spraying a lethal drug in his ear as he arrived for work at his office in Jordan in 1997. Such is the new sense of security for Hamas here in Doha that Mishal is constantly taking calls and sending texts from a mobile phone - forbidden in Damascus because of Israel's use of mobile phones as tools of assassination, either by an explosive concealed in the body of a phone or the use of its signal to trigger a bomb pre-positioned near a target. And for that reason Mishal still has his limitations. "I don't carry the cell phone - I am a target," he says, laughing along with the luckless aide carrying his mobile phone when a visitor asks if that particular staffer is deemed to be expendable. Our discussion of demands by the international community for Hamas to renounce violence and to recognise Israel calls to mind Arafat's acute discomfort in 1988 when, as leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, he was made "to play [that] last card" as the price for Washington agreeing to a dialogue that became the so-called peace process which, 20 years later, is stalled. Arafat was hauled twice to a lectern in Geneva before he could publicly utter an agreed form of words that explicitly renounced terrorism and recognised Israel. Having done so, he snapped, seemingly addressing the foreign policy gurus in Washington: "Enough is enough, enough is enough! What do they want - do you want me to striptease? But during several meetings with Fairfax Media in Doha in the first week of February, Mishal keeps his clothes on. "I have said repeatedly, Hamas is ready for dialogue and for talking with the West," he says. But we do not, in any circumstances, accept that any dealing between the West and Hamas be conditional. The right approach would be an unconditional dialogue. Despite the seemingly relaxed security, Mishal moves around Doha in a three-car convoy, with his own Hamas bodyguards and their bag of guns. Even a visit to his grandchildren becomes a major operation - as his suited guards, with earpieces, fan out across sandy flats on the outskirts of the Qatari capital, the children play near his daughter's home. Five of Mishal's children - three daughters, two sons - have completed university, graduating in computer engineering, information technology, chemistry and dentistry. A sixth is expected to finish accountancy studies soon and the seventh and youngest starts university this year. As with visiting his grandchildren, when Mishal goes to one of several private gyms he uses around the city, the guards arrive first. They check the place and Mishal does not alight from the black Mercedes Benz until one of the guards signals with a curt nod of his head. He enters in a scrum of guards, one of whom insists that the vertical blinds remain drawn as Mishal moves between a treadmill and the stationary cycle. These days the Hamas leader is bigger in the mid-section than he was in Damascus, perhaps the price he pays for a never-ending whirl of official meetings in Doha and elsewhere in the region. But at the gym, this 57-year-old is surprisingly nimble - pressing the full palm of both hands to the floor as he touches his toes; and then touching his hand, outstretched at shoulder-level, with an explosive kick of each foot. He works out in a well-worn blue Adidas tracksuit with matching runners. Occasionally he breaks into a dainty trot, but most of Mishal's time on the treadmill is a brisk walk up to an hour at about 6km/h. "I'm familiar with walking because I'm a farmer from Silwad," he says, invoking the name of the West Bank village from which his family fled in the first days of the Six-Day War in 1967. Inevitably business intrudes. Mishal throws out challenges for guards and visitors alike to touch their toes as he does, but there are also long and serious conversations in Arabic with an aide who paces close to the treadmill, arms tightly folded across his chest. At the end of his gym routine, Mishal makes his security men swap their pistols for paddles for a highly competitive round of table tennis before adjourning for Turkish coffee at the nearby home of an old friend who indeed has a sense of humour - he calls his caged canary Khalid. But there is not a lot of humour when Mishal is challenged on Western demands for Hamas to renounce violence and to revise the movement's charter, to delete its crude anti-Semitism and its call for the elimination of the state of Israel. "Why should we be the ones on whom conditions are imposed, but not on the Israelis?" he asks, indignant. Who should be asked to stop their violence and state terrorism - Israel or us? Who should be asked to change their ways - those who occupy or the victims of their occupation? Why should Hamas be asked to revise its charter when Israel enshrines in its laws and in the positions held by its prominent leaders and political parties things that don't recognise the rights of Palestinians? Some of them consider Jordan the home of the Palestinian people. Does it make sense that the world agrees to deal with an extremist, a racist like [former Israeli foreign minister Avigdor] Lieberman, at the same time as it wants to make a fuss about some text on sheets of paper? They deal with us as if we are weak and so they have no respect or consideration for us. But when they deal with Israel, they take every precaution in how they talk and always refrain from imposing conditions on it. This is why I say publicly, for all to know, that I reject the [West's] conditions - we will not recognise Israel. We will not agree to all previous agreements entered into by the PLO. Asked if this line could be interpreted as rhetoric before inevitable realpolitik concessions, Mishal holds the Hamas line: "We'll adhere to our rights and absolutes, but Hamas is capable of working with Arabs and Palestinians towards the establishment of a state inside the '67 borders - which, of course, will have Jerusalem as its capital and a right of return for all refugees." And for all that, there is a sense, maybe a realisation, that something has to give. Is someone going to blink?