  The energy spectra of TeV gamma-rays from blazars, after being corrected for
intergalatic absorption in the Extragalactic Background Light (EBL), appear
unusually hard, a fact that poses challenges to the conventional models of
particle acceleration in TeV blazars and/or to the EBL models. In this paper we
show that the internal absorption of gamma-rays caused by interactions with
dense narrow-band radiation fields in the vicinity of compact gamma-ray
production regions can lead to the formation of gamma-ray spectra of an almost
arbitrary hardness. This allows significant relaxation of the current tight
constraints on particle acceleration and radiation models, although at the
expense of enhanced requirements to the available nonthermal energy budget. The
latter, however, is not a critical issue, as long as it can be largely
compensated by the Doppler boosting, assuming very large ($\geq 30$) Doppler
factors of the relativistically moving gamma-ray production regions. The
suggested scenario of formation of hard gamma-ray spectra predicts detectable
synchrotron radiation of secondary electron-positron pairs which might require
a revision of the current ``standard paradigm'' of spectral energy
distributions of gamma-ray blazars. If the primary gamma-rays are of hadronic
origin related to $pp$ or $p \gamma$ interactions, the ``internal gamma-ray
absorption'' model predicts neutrino fluxes close to the detection threshold of
the next generation high energy neutrino detectors.
