In Search for Peace, a Shrinking White House Role

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 2, 2008; A16

When Palestinians broke through the barrier dividing the Gaza Strip and Egypt in January and streamed across the border by the tens of thousands, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak faced a moment of crisis. His phone soon rang, but the world leader offering help on the other end was not President Bush -- it was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Mubarak took the call, resulting in the first such contact between leaders of the two nations since relations were severed nearly three decades ago.

The conversation signaled a growing rapprochement between Egypt, which receives nearly $2 billion in annual aid from Washington, and Iran, a country that the Bush administration has tried to isolate as a possible threat to U.S. interests in the region.

As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice heads back to the Middle East this week, three months after Bush hosted a peace conference bringing together Israelis and Arabs in Annapolis, prospects for peace have shifted dramatically. There has been little clear movement in peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, while the Iranian-backed militant group Hamas has shown increasingly that it can set the region's agenda.

Hamas rockets have continued to rain down on Israeli towns, prompting deadly counterattacks by Israel amid increasing speculation that Israel will invade the narrow coastal strip housing 1.5 million Palestinians that it abandoned just two years ago.

Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, said that key players in the region are moving beyond the Bush administration. "The feeling is that if you keep the flash points on a lower or somewhat higher flame, it will give you more cards when a new administration comes in," he said, speaking in a phone interview from Israel. "Everyone is sucking up to the Iranians," he added.

The signs of American irrelevance are apparent throughout the region. Even Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, hailed as a potential peacemaker by the Bush administration, mused last week to the Jordanian newspaper al-Dustour that in the future it might be necessary to return to armed struggle against Israel. And Syria, which received an unexpected invitation to Annapolis, believes that the peace summit was "an exercise in public relations" and that Bush has no interest in peace, as Syria's ambassador to Washington, Imad Moustapha put it last week.

Rice's first stop, on Tuesday, will be Cairo, where she will consult with Mubarak and other Egyptian officials on Gaza. She then will shuttle between Israeli and Palestinian officials on Tuesday and Wednesday, seeking to head off a deadly confrontation between Israel and Hamas while pushing for progress in the nascent peace talks.

The architecture of Annapolis established by Rice includes four key tracks, all of which are supposed to operate simultaneously: high-level talks on "final status" issues such as the division of Jerusalem; incremental changes in security, Jewish settlements on the West Bank and roadblocks hindering Palestinian movement; jump-starting the Palestinian economy; and greater Arab involvement. The final-status talks have been shrouded in secrecy, while little has happened on the other tracks, participants said. The number of roadblocks has increased, according to U.N. estimates.

"Politically, I have not heard anything that is good," a senior Arab diplomat said.

Organizers of a Palestinian investment conference scheduled for late May, designed to bring Arab businessmen to Bethlehem, have expressed concern that senior Arab executives will be forced to wait for hours in humiliating checks at roadblocks, potentially spoiling the mood for investment.

The lack of movement has added to the skepticism, even in Israel. A poll published in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth last week showed that 69 percent of Israelis surveyed believed the talks would not bring peace, while 78 percent believed the talks were being held only for political reasons.

During a recent visit to Washington, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad charged that Israel has "not done a thing materially on the ground to help my government." Israeli officials counter that Israel has taken steps to bolster the Abbas government, but that some efforts -- such as new restrictions on settlement growth -- cannot be publicized because of the tenuous political situation in Israel.

Ghaith al-Omari, a former adviser to Abbas and now advocacy director for the American Task Force on Palestine, faulted the Bush administration for not nurturing a process that it started. He noted that the administration has appointed three generals to assess various aspects of the issue, but that few people in the region understand their roles. Rice's two-day visit this week is her first substantive trip since the conference in November.

"There is no push from the Americans," he said. "We are still waiting to see what they will do. It is surprising how little has happened. If you guys are going to run out of steam, why create all these expectations?"

"It is a big question mark," said Martin Indyk, director of the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy. "The impression one gets is that this administration is out of juice."

Most observers give the administration six months, until the Democratic and Republican conventions, to show that progress on the peace talks is possible. But the Annapolis conference has been increasingly overshadowed by the conflict over Gaza.

The Annapolis talks were designed to bolster Abbas so he could overcome the challenge from Hamas. In 2006, the militant group unexpectedly won Palestinian elections that the Bush administration had supported, beating Abbas's Fatah party, and a unity government between the two sides went sour when Hamas seized control of Gaza last June. The administration had hoped that if Abbas could seal a peace deal, it would give him the popular support to oust Hamas, which has called for Israel's destruction.

Neither Hamas nor Iran was invited to Annapolis but, as Ahmadinejad's courting of Mubarak suggests, the administration's effort to divide the region into "moderate" and "extremist" camps has not succeeded. After the phone call between the two men, Iran's foreign minister declared that diplomatic ties with Cairo would soon be restored.

Meanwhile, Hamas has gained popularity as Israel has attempted an economic blockade of Gaza. Hamas bulldozers burst through the Gaza-Egyptian border in January, while Hamas rockets last week reached Ashkelon, an Israeli city of 120,000 that generally had been safe from Hamas attacks.

Egypt would like to arrange a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas while giving the Palestinian Authority control over border crossings, Arab diplomats said. But those would be difficult negotiations as public pressure increases in Israel for a ground invasion of Gaza. In the best-case scenario for Israel, that would wipe out Hamas's leadership, but it could also prove as vexing as Israel's war against Hezbollah in 2006.

Some argue that Hamas's strength can no longer be ignored. Before the Annapolis conference, a group of U.S. foreign policy specialists -- including former national security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft and former congressman Lee H. Hamilton -- wrote Bush to argue that "a genuine dialogue with the organization is far preferable to its isolation." But State Department spokesman Tom Casey said Friday, "It's pretty hard to say that Hamas has a legitimate role to play in this process if their main policy is to promote terror."

Palestinians Halt Talks, Killings Mount

By IBRAHIM BARZAK
The Associated Press
Sunday, March 2, 2008; 11:00 AM

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- Israel sent missiles slamming into the office of Gaza's Hamas prime minister Sunday, pressing on with an offensive that has killed nearly 70 Palestinians in two days. The moderate Palestinian president suspended peace talks with Israel.

At least 54 Palestinians, roughly half of them civilians, were killed in Gaza fighting Saturday, the deadliest day in more than seven years of violence, Palestinian medical officials said. Another 14 Palestinians, one of them a 21-month-old girl, were killed or found dead Sunday. Two Israeli soldiers were killed on Saturday.

Since the latest bout of fighting erupted on Wednesday, more than 100 Palestinians have been killed, according to an AP tally based on Palestinian medical officials and militant groups.

"We are following the aggression against our people in Gaza," Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told reporters. "I've conducted contacts with various leaders, with the Security Council, with the EU and with Arab leaders to work to stop this aggression," he said.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said peace talks with Israel had been halted.

"For the time being, the negotiations are suspended because we have so many funerals," he said. It was unclear when the talks, relaunched last November at a U.S.-hosted summit, would resume.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is scheduled to visit this week to try to spur progress in peace talks. Instead, she will likely spend her visit trying to put out the latest fire.

Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh's office was empty at the time of Sunday's pre-dawn airstrike. But the raid was seen as a tough message to the Hamas leadership, which Israel holds responsible for repeated rocket barrages launched from Gaza.

Haniyeh spoke to leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, asking them "to stop this aggression," said government spokesman Taher Nunu. He also called for reconciliation talks with Fatah, the rival Palestinian faction headed by Abbas and ousted from Gaza by Hamas last June.

Israel's response to incessant Palestinian rocket fire at southern Israeli communities drew hard international condemnation. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon accused Israel of "disproportionate and excessive use of force."

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rejected the criticism and vowed to press on with the Gaza offensive.

"With all due respect, nothing will prevent us from continuing operations to protect our citizens," he told his Cabinet.

Olmert's defense minister, Ehud Barak, said an even broader Gaza operation was in the cards, aimed at crushing militant rocket squads but also to "weaken the Hamas rule, in the right circumstances, even to bring it down."

Israel regularly clashes with Gaza rocket squads, but intensified its operations after militants fired salvos last week into Ashkelon, a city of 120,000 closer to Israel's heartland than previous targets. By striking Ashkelon, some 11 miles north of Gaza, Hamas added pressure on Israeli leaders to exact a high price for the increasing sense of insecurity felt in southern Israel.

The onslaught failed however to stop rockets from battering southern Israel. Nine were fired at southern Israel by midday Sunday, including one that struck a house in the rocket-scarred town of Sderot less than a mile from Gaza, the military said. One rocket lightly wounded four Sderot residents, Israeli rescue services said.

About 50 rockets and mortars were fired Saturday, injuring six Israelis.

Haniyeh's office was one of about a dozen targets Israeli aircraft and ground troops struck before dawn.

Overnight, a 14-year-old Palestinian girl and five militants died of their wounds, and six Palestinians were killed in Israeli raids, including the baby girl who died from shrapnel wounds, Palestinian medical officials said.

The bodies of two women also were unearthed from the rubble of an earlier Israeli airstrike.

Since the latest round of fighting erupted Wednesday, at least half of those killed were militants, according to Hamas and medical officials. Gaza health officials said about 200 people have been wounded, 14 of them critically.

The normally bustling streets of Gaza City were eerily empty Sunday. Schools and universities were closed. The sound of verses from the Muslim holy book, the Quran, pouring forth from mosque loudspeakers mingled with the roar of Israeli warplanes and unmanned drones in the sky.

Hamas blocked off roads to government buildings and security installations to protect civilians from possible Israeli strikes.

Hundreds gathered outside Gaza hospitals waiting for bodies to be brought out of morgues for burial. Many, like schoolteacher Tawfek Shaban, a 44-year-old father of five, were holding small radios, listening to the news.

"Shame on the Arabs, shame on the Muslims, shame on humanity ... When they will act to stop Israel?" Shaban asked. "There is no safe place in Gaza."

The Saturday toll was by far the highest since the second Palestinian uprising erupted in late 2000.

Abbas, who leads a rival government in the West Bank, suspended peace talks with Israel, his office said. On Saturday, Palestinian leaders from both Hamas and Fatah called Israel's assault a "holocaust" and "genocide."

In a symbolic move, Abbas donated blood to Gaza residents at his West Bank office.

Hamas remained defiant and threatened to retaliate.

"The Zionists will not enjoy security in ... all the colonies around Gaza as long as their crimes continue," said Abu Obeida, a spokesman for Hamas' military wing.

Olmert said "attacking Hamas strengthens the chance for peace."

"I'm sure that beyond certain statements, the Palestinian leadership, the one with whom we want to achieve peace, also understands that," he said.

Olmert and Abbas have set a year-end target for reaching an accord.

Abbas has ruled from the West Bank since his Hamas rivals violently seized control of Gaza last June. But the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza has threatened to unleash a backlash against him in the West Bank.

In the West Bank city of Hebron, Israeli troops shot and killed a 14-year-old Palestinian boy after several hundred youths threw stones and bottles at an Israeli checkpoint in the city center to protest the killings in Gaza, according to Palestinian medical officials.

In Ramallah, home to Abbas' government, thousands of schoolchildren demonstrated against Israel. Some accused Abbas of being an Israeli agent, and protesters threw stones and cars, burned tires and forced shopkeepers to close their stores.

Hamas Forces Shoot Own Supporters at Rally; Youth Killed

By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM, Sept. 1 — Shots from Hamas security forces hit the group’s own supporters in Gaza on Saturday when a rally near the Egyptian border threatened to spiral out of control, witnesses said. One teenager was killed and several other demonstrators were wounded, Palestinian medics said.

Hamas had called for the demonstration, which thousands attended, to protest the closing of the Rafah border crossing. It has been closed since Hamas seized control of Gaza in June.

Members of the Hamas paramilitary police force fired into the air to disperse protesters who were trying to dash into Egypt, the witnesses said. The teenager, identified as Muhammad Qdaih, 17, was hit and died a short while later. A spokesman for the Hamas-run Interior Ministry in Gaza, Ehab al-Ghsein, said officials were trying “to determine where the shot came from.”

The border incident came as tensions mounted in Gaza between Hamas and its rival, Fatah. Early Saturday, a bomb destroyed the car of a Palestinian affiliated with Hamas. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, called a meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization Executive Committee in Ramallah for Saturday evening. He said the committee, which represents most Palestinian factions but not Hamas, would discuss developments in the Gaza Strip and “ways of protecting our people from the madness and repression.”

On Friday, thousands of Palestinians in Gaza defied Hamas to join a Fatah-inspired protest, clashing with Hamas forces. Several protesters were injured and dozens detained, reports from Gaza said. A Fatah spokesman, Ahmed Abdel Rahman, called the protest the start of “a new era in the Palestinian national struggle to cleanse the homeland of Hamas gangs.”

No one was hurt in the car blast on Saturday. Mr. Ghsein, the Interior Ministry spokesman in Gaza, said Fatah leaders were behind the attack. “We have strong confirmation of a new network involving the powerful leaders in Ramallah and their misled supporters in Gaza,” he said.

Mr. Ghsein said that five other explosions went off in Gaza City in recent weeks, mainly near Hamas-run security compounds. He added that some arrests had been made, and that Hamas security officials had been “tracking phone calls” between the suspects in the blasts and their handlers in Ramallah.

A Fatah official in Ramallah, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with reporters, dismissed Mr. Ghsein’s statements as “not true at all.”

Safwat al-Kahlout contributed reporting from Gaza City.

Fatah Militants Lay Down Arms to Bolster Abbas

By ISABEL KERSHNER

NABLUS, West Bank, July 19 — Scores of West Bank Palestinian militants taken off Israel’s wanted list as a gesture to President Mahmoud Abbas are handing in weapons and signing pledges to cease violence against Israel, saying they want to give Mr. Abbas a chance to consolidate his rule here.

Interviews and encounters with more than a dozen members of the gun-toting, notoriously unruly Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, associated with Mr. Abbas’s Fatah faction, indicate that at least in the West Bank they are taking an open-ended timeout.

“Everything must come to an end,” said Mahdi Maraka, an Aksa Brigades leader from Al Ein refugee camp here in Nablus, a traditional hotbed of Fatah militancy in the northern West Bank. “There are two tracks, the political and the military. Now is the time for the political stage.”

Nasr Kharaz, 31, an armed militant and spokesman for the Brigades in the West Bank, said, “The military wing of Fatah has stopped armed resistance at this stage.”

The Aksa Brigades, which first appeared in 2000, was one of the driving forces of the second Palestinian intifada. It was built by Fatah’s grass-roots leadership with the backing of Yasir Arafat as a nationalist force to rival the Islamic militants of Hamas in the armed struggle against Israel.

At the height of the intifada, the brigades — thought to number in the hundreds — carried out scores of shooting attacks on Israeli civilian vehicles and moved on to suicide bombings inside Israel.

But in the occupied West Bank in recent years, they have mostly confined themselves to engaging Israeli soldiers who have come looking for them on their turf. Associates of one of the Brigades’ chief architects, the jailed but influential Marwan Barghouti, say even they support the amnesty. In Gaza, by contrast, a more aggressive spirit of armed resistance lives on. There, men affiliated with the Aksa Brigades are still firing rockets at Israel.

In the West Bank, Hamas has been adhering to a unilateral ceasefire for its own reasons, its militants underground. All the recent suicide bombings in Israel have been carried out by the extremist group Islamic Jihad.

For both Israel and the Aksa Brigades in the West Bank, the emerging cease-fire is an experiment. The disarmed gunmen say they know exactly where their weapons are and who is safeguarding them. And Israel could always draw up a new wanted list.

But some of the Aksa militants say that the seven years of this intifada have achieved nothing, and all of those interviewed said they want to give Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president and leader of the embattled Fatah faction, a chance to negotiate an independent Palestinian state.

“We didn’t want to be obstacles in the way of the national project,” said Ibrahim Sahli, a senior Aksa commander for the northern West Bank better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Jabal, or father of the mountain.

The fatigue of war colors some of the men’s conversations. Inside Preventive Security headquarters in Bethlehem, an Aksa member named Khalil Abayat, 45, grinned widely, his face deeply tanned. He said he was five years on the run, “moving from one mountain to another, one cave to another,” sheltering in abandoned houses, with only fleeting visits home to his wife and 12 children.

His brother and cousin were killed by Israeli forces and two of his sons are in Israeli jails. Asked if he is retiring from the resistance, he said: “Enough. I’m exhausted. I just want to rest.”

In another room in the Preventive Security compound in Bethlehem, Amjad Khalawi, 35, told how he had let his hair grow to his waist since, as he put it, he “disappeared” in 2002. “I didn’t see anybody and nobody saw me,” he said. He looks forward to marrying the fiancée he has seen only once in those five years.

But for others, the politics are dominant. They want to aid Fatah, which is closing ranks, in its fight against Hamas, which violently conquered Gaza in mid-June.

After the takeover, Mr. Maraka, Abu Jabal and their foot soldiers took revenge in Nablus, burning and looting dozens of offices and institutions affiliated with Hamas. A month ago, when Mr. Maraka, 30, was interviewed in downtown Nablus, where he appeared with an M-16 machine gun and some armed cohorts in ski masks, he said that the moment Mr. Abbas “provides us with security from the Israelis, we won’t need these weapons.”

Last Sunday, with Israel seeking ways to bolster Mr. Abbas as a brake on Hamas, Israeli and Palestinian security officials announced that they had agreed on a list of 178 Aksa Brigades members to be offered immunity for past deeds; Mr. Maraka, Abu Jabal and most of their cell members were on it. Security officials would not say what any of the individuals on the list were wanted for, beyond saying that they had all been involved in “security-related activity against Israel.”

The gunmen signed a pledge to give up all anti-Israeli activity, handed in their weapons and agreed to remain inside local Palestinian Authority Intelligence or Preventive Security compounds for a week and in their home cities for the next three months. They say they are now relying on Mr. Abbas and the authority for protection from Hamas.

If Israel is satisfied that the former fighters are committed to their pledge, they will be able to leave their fugitive lives behind and become salaried employees of the official security services from which most of them originally sprung.

The deal has proved so popular that there is already talk of another list, and Aksa militants seem ready to line up for it. “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want to be on it,” Mr. Maraka said, speaking in a second interview on Thursday in his temporary billet: a former prison cell now equipped with a TV set, a fridge and a whirring fan, at the authority’s intelligence headquarters in Nablus. Abu Jabal, a portly figure, speaking under a vine outside his home in Al Ein, said he was on a brief “vacation” from the Preventive Security headquarters in the city, where he was spending the week.

Both men were relaxed and joking, the weapons that had so long defined them conspicuously absent.

Ahmed Balboul, reputedly one of the most wanted men in Bethlehem, was not on the first list, but hopes to be on the next. Meeting openly in Manger Square, he came unarmed. “I could hand over five rifles for the cameras and buy another 10,” he said. “Our intentions are more important than the rifles, and our intentions are turned toward negotiation.”

Naturally, there is deep skepticism about how long any lull in the violence can last.

“In Palestinian history there are no beginnings and no ends,” said Mahdi Abdul Hadi, director of Passia, a Palestinian research institute. “There are unfolding chapters, like waves in the sea.” The Aksa men are swimming with the tide, he said, “but they don’t know where it will take them.”

Like the some other groups in the first intifada — the Black Panthers and the Fatah Hawks — and Fatah’s military wing, Al Asifa (The Storm) before them, Al Aksa Brigades may yet reappear, or be reincarnated under different name.

Much will now depend on Israel’s willingness to adhere to the cease-fire with Fatah and engage in a serious peace effort toward the establishment of a Palestinian state, many Palestinians say.

“Deactivating terrorists is a step,” said Miri Eisin, spokeswoman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. “Let’s see if it works, and if it does, we can move forward.”

Whatever happens, said Qadura Fares, a Fatah politician in Ramallah and an associate of the jailed Mr. Barghouti, “there will never be a vacuum.”

“It will be filled,” he said, “with either dialogue and peace, or another round of confrontation.”

Mr. Maraka, for one, is making sure that the next generation is prepared to continue the struggle if need be. At the intelligence headquarters in Nablus, he proudly showed video clips on his cellphone of his sons, ages 10 and 8, firing an Israeli Galil assault rifle and an M-16 on a barren mountainside.

Israel Releases 255 Palestinian Prisoners

Move Is Intended to Boost Popularity of Fatah's Abbas

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 21, 2007; A08

BEITUNIYA, West Bank, July 20 -- Israeli police arrested Faten Daraghmeh four years ago in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Ariel. The mother of seven children wore a vest packed with explosives, and she later informed her family that she had planned to blow herself up inside a crowded shopping mall. Instead she went to jail.

Now she is home. Daraghmeh and 254 other Palestinian prisoners walked out of their cells Friday and crossed into the West Bank here just before noon in an ecstatic eight-bus convoy -- Palestinian flags, Fatah party banners, and smiling faces poking out from open windows.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert agreed to release the prisoners, less than 3 percent of an estimated 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails, to boost the popularity of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party at a pivotal moment in its political standoff with the rival Hamas movement.

But the first mass prisoner release in more than two years could harden the partisan divide between the armed Islamic movement and Fatah, a secular party that has the backing of the Bush administration.

None of those freed Friday were from Hamas, Israeli and Hamas officials confirmed, although a few were members of Palestinian factions other than Fatah. The vast majority belonged to Abbas's party, including Daraghmeh, who frantically waved a poster with the president's picture as her women-only bus passed through this crossing north of Jerusalem.

Three of her daughters waited with the chanting throngs for their mother, who had served just over half her sentence. As she appeared in the window, the crowd lifted up Noura, a 4-year-old in an embroidered tunic, and Shuruq, a 5-year-old in a frilly white party dress, to ride with their mother before the bus zipped toward Abbas's presidential compound for a partisan celebration.

"I'm thanking Abu Mazen very much," Daraghmeh, in her 30s, called from the window, referring to Abbas by his nickname.

Prisoners are venerated for their sacrifice in Palestinian society, and the issue is among the most emotionally resonant in the long conflict with Israel. This prisoner release, highly unpopular among Olmert's hawkish coalition partners, comes as pressure mounts on Israel from the Bush administration, Egypt and Jordan to do more to improve Fatah's standing in the West Bank.

Last month, Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip, sealing the political division of the two territories envisioned as the main components of a future Palestinian state.

Abbas immediately fired the Hamas-led unity government and appointed an emergency cabinet that now holds sway in the West Bank. But its political legitimacy has been challenged by Hamas and others because it continues operating without approval from the Hamas-dominated parliament. The Islamic movement won 2006 elections that were championed by the Bush administration.

After the emergency government's 30-day mandate expired last week, Abbas reappointed independent lawmaker Salam Fayyad as prime minister and made minor changes to the cabinet before installing it again. He has pledged to call early presidential and parliamentary elections, which his Fatah movement, struggling to rehabilitate its political image after years of corrupt, hapless rule, is by no means assured of winning.

Hamas, meanwhile, is running a parallel government in Gaza, where an already impoverished economy is nearing collapse because Israel has closed cargo crossings to all but emergency aid.

Fatah's support is hardly universal, even in the West Bank. "We hope that what happened in Gaza happens here in the West Bank," said Mahmoud Daraghmeh, Faten's older brother, who sells vegetables in their village near Nablus. "We want Fatah gone altogether. With Fatah, it's all lies."

Israel freed 898 Palestinian prisoners in two phases during the first six months of 2005. At the time, Abbas, newly elected as president, had successfully brokered a cease-fire with Israel among most of the armed Palestinian factions, including Hamas.

Israeli officials said that release was designed to strengthen Abbas, but in elections eight months later Hamas prevailed. Now, Olmert is pursuing a similar strategy, which includes transferring some frozen Palestinian tax revenue and granting a three-month trial amnesty to nearly 200 wanted Fatah gunmen in the West Bank.

In recent days, scores of Fatah activists and gunmen from its armed wing, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, have emerged from hiding. Many are sleeping at night for the first time in years, adjusting to a life outside of self-imposed confinement to avoid Israeli capture.

"I didn't see the sunshine, I didn't know if it was raining," said Amjad Kharawi, a 35-year-old Fatah activist, who turned himself in to the Palestinian Preventive Security headquarters in Bethlehem this week after five years in hiding. "I missed meat, all kinds of food, and coffee."

A scraggly beard reaching to his chest and his hair falling past his shoulders, Kharawi became a fugitive in April 2002 when Israeli forces arrived at his home in the Deheishe refugee camp near Bethlehem looking for him. He said he is not a member of Fatah's armed wing and intends now to join the Palestinian security services and marry his fiancee, whom he has not seen since he went into hiding.

"Israel has always been responsible for weakening Abu Mazen," Kharawi said. "What I know is that he is my president, though, and I will abide by the decisions he makes."

Among those released Friday was Abdel Rahim Malouh, the second-ranking official of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Abbas often works with the party, a Marxist movement with a small presence in parliament. Red banners bobbed above the crowd, and a number of the party's young activists danced and chanted while waiting for the buses to arrive.

Most of those gathered wore the black-and-white checked scarves of Fatah, including 25-year-old Suha Mousa, who awaited her brother. Murad Mousa, who was a student at al-Quds Open University at the time of his arrest for participating in stone-throwing demonstrations, served more than half of his nine year sentence.

"We couldn't sleep we were so excited after we heard he would be released," she said. "But it is a time of mixed feelings. We are happy about my brother, but there are many others still in there."

In Gaza, Hamas walks an ideological tightrope

Tensions grow between the party's pragmatists and hardliners as groups with more radical visions gain adherents.
By Jeffrey Fleishman
Times Staff Writer

July 13, 2007

GAZA CITY — Rifles popping and flags waving, the funeral cortege for the militant, his shrouded body hoisted on a stretcher, wound through breezeless streets, passing beneath the window of Jamil Mezher, who moments earlier had mentioned that such extremists were an incessant danger to the Gaza Strip.

The dead man, Hasam Harb, was at once a martyr and an omen. A member of Islamic Jihad, he was killed by an Israeli rocket, a fighter revered by the boys scurrying after his procession. But he was also part of an ideology seeking to capitalize on the unrest between Palestinian political parties and turn Gaza into a radical Islamic state.

"Many young people are now willing to participate in these jihad groups," said Mezher, a member of the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a left-leaning faction within the Palestinian Authority. "There has been a large number of attacks against Internet cafes and entertainment places in recent years. In our history, we have never had violence like this before. They want us to be more Islamic. They bombed our cultural center the other day because we offered traditional Palestinian dancing."

The tug of religious extremism has intensified in recent years. Beneficiaries of smuggled weapons and the region's poverty and frustration, these organizations have found cover under the militant group Hamas, which last month seized control of Gaza during clashes with the more secular Fatah party.

Hamas says it disavows Islamic radicalism but faces tension between its religious hard-liners and pragmatists who want to convince the West that it is not a political mask for jihad.

The wider challenge for Hamas is whether it can, or even wishes to, rein in independent Islamist groups seeking to impose Sharia law that would limit other religions and force women to wear hijabs or head scarves. These organizations have made Hamas, which has overwhelming support here and is viewed by the West as a dangerous political movement, appear less threatening in the spectrum of Islamic voices.

Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas blamed Hamas on Tuesday for what he claimed were increasing numbers of terrorists inside Gaza. "Thanks to the support of Hamas, Al Qaeda is entering Gaza," said Abbas.

Hamas spokesman Sami abu Zuhri said, "Hamas has no link to Al Qaeda." He accused Abbas of "trying to mislead international opinion to win support for his demand to deploy international forces in Gaza."

Deciphering the strands of Islamic militant cells, their influence, clan allegiances and how they are woven into Gaza's larger factional picture is complicated.

A June 14 attack on the Rosary Sisters School, for example, suggested both a criminal element and an underlying Islamist fervor against Christians. During fighting between Fatah and Hamas, Fatah forces used the school roof as strategic high ground. Hamas' main military wing, the Izzidin al-Qassam Brigade, fired crudely manufactured rocket-propelled grenades and stormed the campus.

--

Extensive damage

Hamas routed Fatah, and much of the $100,000 worth of damage to the school — which has 520 students, the overwhelming majority of whom are Muslims — was caused by combat. But amid scorched walls and broken glass, the chapel for the school's three nuns was ransacked, altar crosses were broken or bent, a statue of Jesus was smashed. Upstairs, the nuns' rooms were burned and vandalized.

"This was an attack against the school itself," said Hanidi Maswak, the deputy director, who crunched over glass in the blackened hallways the other day. "It wasn't just a crime or looting. In the beginning, Hamas battled Fatah security men, but then some of them realized this was a Christian place and intentionally did this damage. Hamas will not undermine [religious] extremists like this. If Hamas can't control them, we'll go back to blood feuds and revenge."

Across town at the Holy Family Catholic Church and School, a first-grade teacher, who gave her name only as Madlan, watched her son run with a paper kite through the courtyard. The school's principal didn't want to talk, except to say that "things were critical."

Madlan was also unsure of what to say and how to gauge the new dynamics for Gaza's 3,000 Christians, who for generations have enjoyed relative calm amid a Palestinian leadership that had not been religiously radical.

"The first day after the fighting I was stopped by Hamas and they said now this is an Islamist country," she said. "But I don't think Christians are being targeted yet. There was a speech a few days later [by a Hamas leader] and he spoke of Palestinian unity between religions and that calmed things. But if we had to leave, where would we go? I am a Palestinian."

Mezher said the economic embargo imposed on Gaza after Hamas' electoral victory in 2006, has emboldened extremists and deepened the ideological divide within Hamas. The U.S. and other Western powers view Hamas as a militant Islamic party that, much like Hezbollah in Lebanon, could further destabilize the Middle East. But Mezher said other breakaway organizations are more dangerous.

"Since Hamas came to power in parliamentary elections. some people in its military wing have started to believe that Hamas has made too many political concessions," said Mezher. "These people are not happy. They've left Hamas to establish groups like Al-Islam and others. Some Hamas officials are unofficially supporting these groups."

Ghazi Hamad, an aide to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, said some groups had sought to exploit Gaza's situation and that Hamas' power was limited.

One of them is the Army of Islam, which last week released BBC reporter Alan Johnston after holding him hostage for 114 days. The ordeal revealed Hamas' limitations in controlling small radical groups. Desperate for weeks to gain Johnston's release in hope of convincing the world it is not a terrorist organization, Hamas was stymied by the Army of Islam, which is connected to a rival clan and has links to Al Qaeda. The reporter was freed only after Hamas kidnapped a key figure in the group and surrounded the clan's compound with its fighters.

--

Business drops

Hani A. Abushahla's livelihood is slipping away amid the plotting of Islamists and the sound of gunfire. Co-owner of an import company, Abushahla said business has dropped 75% since a Western embargo was imposed on Gaza last year to weaken Hamas. His contracts, including one for $250,000 from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, have gone unpaid.

He said that he has not noticed a significant increase in religious fanaticism, but that even Hamas' mix of politics and religion, which is tamer than that of groups such as the Army of Islam, is too volatile, and destined to fail.

"Whether they be moderate or extreme, Hamas will not be allowed to succeed in Gaza," said Abushahla. "They won't last. Having an Islamic government succeed here will not be a good model for Egypt and Jordan, who have their own Islamic organizations."

On the day Harb's body was carried through the streets, Basil Shawwa sat in the shade while men around him sipped espressos, ate cake and smoked water pipes.

Shawwa runs a cafe frequented by expats, Palestinian liberals and anyone else who might be offensive to an Islamic militant. His children are on summer break from the Rosary Sisters School; he is sending them to Jordan because things are too dangerous here.

"I know what these extremists are looking for. Do we rent rooms for prostitution? How do people dress? Do we serve alcohol?" Shawwa said, adding that the embargo is making ketchup, sugar and mayonnaise scarce. "Perhaps in the future, the extremists groups will become stronger, but I feel that eventually Hamas and the radicals will end up fighting one another."

--

jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com

Inside Israel's Secret Talks with Hamas

By Tim McGirk/Jerusalem

Having secured the release of kidnapped BBC correspondent Alan Johnston on July 4th, Hamas officials are now moving discreetly to negotiate freedom for another Gaza hostage — Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Shalit, seized in June 2006 in a raid by Palestinian militants who had tunneled under the Israeli security wall around Gaza, is currently being held by kidnappers who include members of Hamas' own military wing, as well another radical group, the Popular Resistance Committees.

An investigation by TIME reveals a marked contrast in how the Israelis and Hamas view their complicated on-again, off-again negotiations over Shalit's release. The disconnect arises partially out of Israel's refusal to deal directly with Hamas, which they consider a terrorist organization. While some informed Israelis say they are "optimistic" that Shalit will be free "within weeks," Hamas officials are far more cautious — one offered the glum assessment that bargaining could drag on for another year.

Israeli military officials and Hamas officials told TIME that the two sides are able to negotiate on the issue via Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, and also in direct talks between Israelis and senior Hamas commanders imprisoned in Israel. The inmates then smuggle messages to the Hamas leadership via lawyers and relatives visiting them in prison.

One Hamas official told TIME that last spring, the militants proposed a deal in which Israel would hand over 1,400 prisoners — at first, 300 Palestinians would be released, and in exchange Hamas would move Shalit from Gaza to Egypt. The Israeli soldier would then be turned over to the Israelis, and another 400 Palestinians would be freed. Seven month after Shalit is safely home, Israel would then free another 700 prisoners. Included in the list were 100 "must release" Palestinians, all convicted of terrorist acts against Israelis. Israel balked at letting loose prisoners "with blood on their hands," who might strike again.

According to a senior Hamas official, that deal fell at the first hurdle: Israel refused to release only a handful of the prisoners on the Hamas list. Negotiations simmered until June, when Hamas seized control of Gaza from rival Fatah militiamen, and talks were broken off. Now, Israel is debating the possibility of freeing around 400 prisoners, including some on Hamas' top 100 list who are deemed unlikely to terrorize Israel again.

But Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, according to a Tel Aviv-based intelligence official, is refusing to release any prisoners who aren't Hamas. (Hamas asked for freedom for members of other Palestinian factions, as well as foreign terror suspects in Israeli hands.) Apparently, Olmert wants to avoid Hamas being seen to gain legitimacy among the Palestinian public by securing prisoner releases, according to this source. To boost Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbbas in his struggle with Hamas, Olmert has vowed to release 250 of Fatah loyalists, a deal criticized by Palestinians as selfish on Abbas' part.

One Hamas offical says he doubts that the militant leadership would accept Israel's new terms, and he blamed Israel for attempting to "sabotage" the prisoner swap. Egyptian Intelligence Chief Suleiman was quoted in the Israeli press as telling Israeli leftist politicians recently that Olmert was "stalling" and must show some flexibility towards Hamas. The Israelis want their soldier freed, but are understandably reluctant to release a horde of potentially dangerous ex-terrorists.

The impasse arises because both Israel and Hamas believe that they hold the stronger hand and don't want to compromise. As canny observers of Israeli politics, Hamas knows that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert could use the freeing of Shalit to boost his plummeting popularity. Meanwhile, the Israelis reckon that Hamas could capitalize on the exchange of hundreds of prisoners as a way to improve their support among Palestinians, and their international standing. Israel and Western government slapped an economic blockade on 1.5 million Gaza residents now living under Hamas' rule, and it would help Hamas' standing if these sanctions were loosened.

The Israelis toughened their negotiating stance believing that with international sanctions squeezing Gaza, Hamas might be desperate to strike a deal. And Hamas has certainly exhibited a new willingness to bargain: exactly a year after Shalit's kidnapping, his captors released an audio tape of the soldier pleading for Olmert to do more to release him.

Although Israel publicly refuses to deal directly with Hamas "terrorists," Israel's top hostage negotiator, Ofer Dekel, met recently with jailed Hamas commanders to persuade them to put pressure on their leadership to accept the new offer. Inside prison, Palestinian inmates are separated according to their allegiance to Hamas or Fatah, since otherwise they would clash, a mirror of their rivalry inside the Palestinian territories. Hamas prisoners are better organized and more disciplined than Fatah inmates, according to Anat Berko, a criminologist at the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, who frequently speaks with the Palestinian inmates. She says that Hamas' efforts to free as many Palestinian prisoners as possible, and not just those belonging to Hamas, has earned the Islamic militants greater support among the 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons.

Still, Hamas officials urge Israel to speak directly with them, since they were freely elected in the January 2006 Palestinian elections, and they now exercise control over Shalit's kidnappers in Gaza. "We are willing to talk directly to the Israelis," says one Hamas official. "So why are the Israelis play the ostrich with us? They're willing to talk with our men in jail but not to us directly."

Jordan Rejects Calls for Federation With Palestinians

By HASSAN M. FATTAH

AMMAN, Jordan, July 6 — Inside a drab cellphone shop, set deep inside the sprawling Baqaa refugee camp on the outskirts of this city, Muhammad Khalil and his friends were as gloomy as the fluorescent lights that flickered on the ceiling.

“Everything has been ruined for us — we’ve been fighting for 60 years and nothing is left,” Mr. Khalil said, speaking of the Palestinian cause. Just weeks earlier, he might have been speaking enthusiastically to his friends here, in their usual hangout, about resistance, of fighting for his rights as a Palestinian and of one day returning to a Palestinian state.

Last Wednesday, however, he spoke of what he saw as a less satisfying goal for the Palestinians here and one that raises concerns for many other Jordanians: Palestinian union with Jordan.

“It would be better if Jordan ran things in Palestine, if King Abdullah could take control of the West Bank,” Mr. Khalil said, as his friends nodded. “The issue would be over if Jordan just took control.”

Even a few months ago, talk of a confederation with Jordan would have sounded quaint or even conspiratorial, 40 years after Jordan lost control of the West Bank in the 1967 war and two decades after King Abdullah’s father, King Hussein, formally ceded administrative control of the territory to the Palestinians.

But as the Palestinian territories have been engulfed in turmoil, with Gaza and the West Bank now divided economically and politically, as well as physically, talk of a less ambitious, but no less delicate, federation between Jordan and the West Bank has begun rippling through many Jordanian and Palestinian circles.

Some Palestinians who have begun speaking of confederation see Jordan as a last resort to bring about security and stability to the West Bank and to prevent it from falling under the control of the militant Hamas faction, as Gaza has. Israeli officials who have spoken of the idea also say Jordan could help peace efforts by taking over security conditions — shorthand, many fear, for Jordan inheriting Israeli responsibility for security there. In any event, when Israel and the United States have spoken of a Palestinian state, they have talked of a demilitarized one, so some solution for Palestinian national security would be needed.

Jordanian commentators also have begun warning that talk of a federation could put an end to the Palestinian national project and put Jordan itself in peril.

“You have a scenario-building exercise going on; Jordan is dealing with complex politics and they are trying to see where they will land and where it will leave the country,” said Oraib al-Rantawi, director of the Al Quds Center for Political Studies in Amman, speaking of the debate about federation. “Jordan has not yet decided on this issue, but it’s clear the debate has begun.”

The nature of any possible union has many iterations. Some see it as possible oversight of the Palestinian territories by Jordan while others see it as a partnership between two nations. But King Abdullah’s position was clear.

In an interview with the daily newspaper Al Ghad on July 1, he sought to put to rest rumors of a possible change in policy on the matter. “I say clearly that the idea of confederation or federation, or what is called administrative responsibility, is a conspiracy against the Palestinian cause, and Jordan will not involve itself in it,” he said. “The Jordanians refuse any settlement of the Palestinian issue at their expense.”

Ayman Safadi, editor in chief of al Ghad, who interviewed the king, said: “He was extremely blunt in the interview. No discussion. It’s a no-go.”

Some analysts, however, said the king’s response helped underscore the level of pressure Jordan may be facing.

“King Abdullah made himself clear on more than one occasion,” said Musa Shtewi, professor of sociology at the University of Jordan. “But by having to do so, it means there’s a lot of pressure being put on Jordan to do this.”

King Hussein, Abdullah’s father, lost the West Bank during the 1967 war and had long hoped to one day reunite both sides of the Jordan River, Professor Shtewi and other analysts said. In 1988, however, he formally disengaged from the territory in a major policy shift that made the Palestine Liberation Organization the sole body responsible for the administration of the Palestinian areas.

Jordanian and Palestinian academics have long talked of the possibility of a political and economic federation. But after Yasir Arafat signed the Oslo peace treaty with the Israelis in 1993, Jordan’s official policy on federation became predicated on the formation of a Palestinian state.

The issue of confederation has become especially delicate among native Jordanians, who fear that a confederation could further empower Jordan’s large number of residents of Palestinian origin, estimated to be up to 60 percent of the population, at their political expense.

“This used to be an academic issue that never died away,” said Professor Shtewi, speaking of confederation. “But now, it has become a political and even an existential issue too.”

Rumors began circulating in May that Jordan might be rethinking its position, when Abdul-Salam al-Majali, a former prime minister, was the host of a meeting of Jordanian, Israeli and Palestinian peace advocates in the Red Sea Port of Aqaba to discuss ways of reinvigorating peace efforts. Mr. Majali, in an interview, said the issue of federation never came up.

But many Jordanian analysts and columnists reported that the meeting touched on the principles of establishing a confederation as a means to breaking the impasse in the peace efforts. Many analysts saw the meeting as a trial balloon intended to gauge the level of interest and resistance to a confederation.

“They don’t really want this, but they wanted to see what their options would be if it was forced on them,” said Mohammed Abu Rumman, a columnist with Al Ghad, referring to the Jordanian government. “Most people will tell you that the confederation scenario is going to happen. The only question is when.”

Palestinian activists, however, warn against taking Palestinian desire for stability as a serious change in their politics.

“Some Palestinians may regard this as a kind of solution, a way out of the problem for them,” said Talat Abu Othman, leader of the Jordanian chapter of the High Committee to Protect the Right of Return. “But these are temporary solutions and temporary solutions don’t fix the problem. Without a right of return, without rights, you will solve nothing.”

Mr. Khalil and his friends in the cellphone shop figure, however, that the wait is growing more difficult by the day. “Jordan wants peace for us,” he said. “Jordan wants us to get our rights.”

Mideast Policy in a Fantasy World

By Jackson Diehl
Monday, July 9, 2007; A15

During Ehud Olmert's visit to Washington last month, I asked a senior Israeli official to explain what the prime minister thought would be the result of his policy -- quickly embraced by the Bush administration -- of isolating the Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip. Since Hamas's coup against the secular Fatah party in mid-June, Israel has allowed in international aid convoys and continued to supply power and water, but otherwise sealed off the territory and its 1.5 million people.

His answer: As conditions worsened, Palestinians in Gaza would grow steadily more disgruntled with Hamas. Eventually, they would turn on their rulers, and the rump Islamic state that threatens to take hold between Egypt and Israel would collapse. Fatah -- which Israel and the United States are supporting in the West Bank -- would regain control.

In other words, Israeli policy is counting on Gaza's impoverished and largely uneducated population to stage the first popular revolution against a domestic government in the modern history of the Arab Middle East. It also assumes that people suffering from extreme privation will respond by demanding a more moderate government.

If this reasoning is far-fetched, it's at least consistent. Ever since Hamas won Palestinian elections at the beginning of last year, Olmert and the Bush administration have adopted a string of failed policies based on ever-more-unlikely scenarios. They began by betting that a diplomatic and aid boycott would either cause Hamas's collapse or force it to formally recognize Israel's right to exist. Then they calculated that the Middle East could be divided into "extremist" and "moderate" states, with the moderates -- including Saudi Arabia -- lining up with Israel against Iran and Hamas. Now they are supposing that they can back the weaker side in an intra-Palestinian power struggle and ensure that it comes out on top.

So far the result of these wishful strategies has been to make Hamas stronger and Palestinians as a whole more radical. The greatest threat to the Gaza regime at the moment is not Fatah but still more bloodthirsty gangs, such as Islamic Jihad and Army of Islam. Many people believe al-Qaeda will soon be a serious factor.

If there's one thing holding Hamas back, it is its own fanciful thinking. Take last week's release of the BBC journalist Alan Johnston, to which Hamas devoted itself soon after ousting Fatah. This was not a simple good deed or an attempt to restore order in Gaza. Hamas's leaders, such as the Damascus-based Khaled Meshal, were clearly calculating that by freeing a Western journalist they could gain international recognition. Like Meshal's earlier supposition that forming a "unity" government with Fatah would end the Western boycott, this was unfounded -- the European Union quickly announced that its policy toward Hamas was unchanged.

What the fantasies of Hamas and Israel have in common is the supposition that they can ignore each other -- except when they are exchanging missiles and bombs. Israeli policy consistently assumes that the Palestinian Islamic movement can be wiped out, or at least eliminated as a military and political force. Hamas bets that it can ultimately win international recognition and acceptance without abandoning its goal of destroying the Jewish state.

In reality, probably the only way forward in the Middle East is for Israel and Hamas to start to come to terms with each other, however provisionally, while accepting that Hamas's formal recognition of Israel, and Western acceptance of Hamas, will come at the end rather than the beginning of the process. Only if they decide on a full-fledged cease-fire will there be a chance to end the violence -- and head off the growing risk of another multi-front war in the Middle East. Only if Hamas agrees to free the Israeli soldier it is still holding hostage, Gilad Shalit, will there be a major Israeli release of Palestinian prisoners. If Israel is to stick to its promise to reduce roadblocks and illegal settlements in the West Bank, it will need Hamas's tacit cooperation -- one suicide bomb by Hamas would quickly reverse any Israeli retreat. And Western governments will find it difficult to do even rudimentary business with Hamas unless Israel goes first.

Why should Israel cut deals with an extremist movement dedicated to its destruction? Won't it undercut Palestinian moderates who still hope to negotiate a two-state settlement or encourage Islamist movements elsewhere in the Middle East? The answer is unsatisfactory but irrefutable: Ignoring reality, and Gaza, is a mistake that Israelis as well as Palestinians can no longer afford.

Israel to Release 250 Fatah Prisoners

By REUTERS

Filed at 6:39 a.m. ET

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel's cabinet agreed on Sunday to release 250 Palestinian prisoners in the latest attempt to strengthen Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas after Hamas's seizure of the Gaza Strip.

"I think this is a worthy gesture to make ... because we want to use any means that can reinforce moderate elements in the Palestinian Authority," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the cabinet in broadcast remarks.

Olmert had pledged to free prisoners of Abbas's Fatah movement in a June 25 summit with the Palestinian leader as part of a Western campaign to bolster the new administration he named after sacking a unity government with Hamas Islamists.

A government official said the cabinet voted 18 to 6 in favor of a motion to release 250 prisoners.

A final release roster will be put together by a committee. Once the Israeli list is approved, it could still take days before prisoners are freed since Israel would allow 48 hours for the releases to be challenged in petitions to the Supreme Court.

Previous prisoner releases have raised opposition from groups representing families of Israelis harmed in Palestinian attacks. Palestinians regard prisoners held by Israel as heroes of what they call resistance against occupation.

Saeb Erekat, a senior aide to Abbas, welcomed the Israeli decision but urged it to draw up the list of those to be freed in coordination with the Palestinians.

"The prisoner issue needs more than gestures to be resolved, however, we welcome the release of prisoners any time," he said.

Officials estimate there are at least 10,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

HAMAS CRITICISM

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said "all Palestinian male and women detainees have the right to be freed." He said the release of only Fatah-affiliated prisoners was part of an attempt by Abbas to "reinforce the principle of separation" with Hamas.

The United States and European Union have been prodding Olmert to nurture contacts with Abbas's emergency government in the hope of resuming long-stalled peace talks.

Olmert told the cabinet that bolstering Palestinian moderates could "encourage them to move in the direction we believe can create conditions for the start of substantial dialogue."

In a goodwill gesture last week, Israel released Palestinian tax funds it had frozen a year ago when Hamas rose to power, a move that helped enable Abbas to pay Palestinian civil servants full salaries for the first time in 17 months.

Hamas, which has rejected Western demands to recognise Israel, renounce violence and accept existing Israeli-Palestinian interim peace accords took over the Gaza Strip last month after routing Fatah in factional fighting.

(Additional reporting by Wafa Amr in Ramallah and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza)

Fatah Gunmen Assert Authority in West Bank

Territory Becomes Mirror Opposite of Gaza

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 8, 2007; A12

NABLUS, West Bank -- The anonymous call on Hafez Shaheen's mobile phone came as an impolite reminder.

"You were at city hall today," the voice warned. "You are not to go back again."

Shaheen is the acting mayor of this West Bank city, elected two years ago on a ticket sponsored by Hamas. The armed Islamic movement trounced forces from the rival secular Fatah party on June 14 to take control of the Gaza Strip, and the reverberations were felt instantly here by Shaheen and his 12 Hamas colleagues on the 15-seat city council.

The next day, scores of Fatah gunmen arrived at city hall with a simple order: Hamas officials should leave and not return. But Shaheen, a bespectacled engineering professor, was back at his office within days and continues to ignore subsequent telephoned threats by Fatah's armed wing.

"I didn't take it very seriously," he said Thursday between signing papers, taking calls from a German development bank and entertaining a visiting U.N. delegation. "But I can't tell the others to come back. I can't take that responsibility because I don't control the street."

The Hamas military conquest of Gaza politically severed the two territories, which are envisioned as cornerstones of a future Palestinian state. Since then, the West Bank has emerged as a mirror opposite of Gaza. Here Fatah militiamen have asserted themselves in the streets, and Hamas has moved into the shadows.

Yet increasingly in Nablus and across the West Bank there are signs, at least at the local level, that the initial fears of broad factional violence are fading. Political life is slowly returning to something like normal. From Bethlehem to Qalqilyah to this most populous West Bank city, Hamas-affiliated local council members such as Shaheen are returning cautiously to the city halls they had abandoned, in some cases defying death threats to do so.

The Palestinian Authority's Ministry of Local Government Affairs sent out a letter in late June ordering all elected council members to return to work, and many Hamas officials are treating the written demand as tacit protection from the Fatah-dominated ministry.

The threat of factional strife remains, however. Many Palestinians believe new elections are the only way to resolve the dispute. But elections have not yet been called. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a Fatah leader, first suggested new elections in December as a way to end the political crisis with Hamas.

Fatah's electoral prospects are highly uncertain, in part because of enduring divisions within the party between Abbas's founding generation and a disaffected younger one clamoring for power. Hamas has slipped in most opinion polls since winning January 2006 parliamentary elections, which gave it day-to-day control of the Palestinian Authority, but its support has been consistently underestimated in past surveys.

"A vote may make things worse, and it may make things better," said Victor Batarseh, 72, the Christian mayor of Bethlehem who is not aligned with Hamas or Fatah. "But we should always go to the ballot instead of bullets."

The day after Hamas seized total control of Gaza in June, some Fatah gunmen came for Khaled Saada. Saada, a Bethlehem councilman elected from the Hamas-sponsored candidate list known as Change and Reform, was not at home. The men searched his house and detained two of his brothers, one of whom belongs to Fatah. The brothers were released unharmed a few days later.

"I'm against importing or exporting tribal disputes from one place to another," said Saada, 50, a widower with a sweeping comb-over. "If my brother is beaten in one area and I take revenge in another, it is not civilized."

Saada returned to Bethlehem's city hall on Manger Square eight days later. Today four of the council's five Hamas members are back at work; the fifth is in an Israeli jail.

A family mediator by profession, Saada said the Palestinians' most pressing problem is the lack of fresh leadership. He said "new blood" would help curtail corruption and dispel old partisan animosities, such as those that flared in Gaza last month.

For a model, he draws on the years he spent in Israeli and Palestinian jails for belonging to an illegal group. Every four months, he said, there were elections for prison leadership. Consecutive terms were prohibited.

"Leadership in our country is like a mattress -- you get one and sleep on it forever," Saada said. "We need change."

Founded in Gaza two decades ago with a charter calling for Israel's destruction, Hamas has always operated more cautiously in the West Bank, where a more religiously diverse and prosperous population has proved less supportive of its message than the strip's poorer, predominantly refugee population. In addition to a military wing, Hamas operates a network of Islamic schools, charities and sports clubs, which have won over many in Gaza and recently became targets of Fatah militias in the West Bank.

Israel ended its permanent presence in Gaza in August 2005. But the Israeli army still pursues Hamas members aggressively in the West Bank, forcing them to keep a low profile or lie about their party affiliation.

Thirty-nine Hamas members of the 132-seat Palestinian parliament are now in Israeli jails, all of them from the West Bank. So are numerous local elected officials, including the mayor and two council members from Nablus.

But the Fatah threat to Shaheen and his council colleagues is new. In their view, it amounts to something like a local coup.

In addition to ordering Hamas council members to go home, Fatah gunmen torched Islamic charities and schools, kidnapped local imams, and raised party banners over government buildings, just as Hamas had done with its green flags in Gaza. Shaheen and other Hamas-affiliated council members agreed to appoint Yahya Arafat, one of two Fatah council members, to manage the city's day-to-day affairs.

"Everyone knew there would be a reaction here after what happened in Gaza," said Arafat, 48, a portly civil engineer. "Sometimes we all meet here, and sometimes we meet someplace private. But I tell them to come back, that by the law, they must come back."

Shaheen, harried and rumpled, is now defying the Fatah militia, known as the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, for several reasons. He is a well-known professor at an-Najah National University who is also from a well-known family. And he is not an official member of Hamas, although he also was elected on its Change and Reform list.

But there are still dangers. On Wednesday, Ghassan Johari, a Hamas council member, returned to his city hall office for the first time. Fearing trouble, Shaheen left immediately. Within an hour, Fatah gunmen arrived for Johari, who had left ahead of them.

The emergency government Abbas appointed last month has pledged to disarm all party militias, including the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. There is no sign that is happening.

"The government has ordered us all back to work, but the street rejects this letter," Shaheen said. "I'm not frightened or worried, but I must take care. It's still not easy here."

After Abbas fired the Hamas-led government, international donors and Israel freed up hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and frozen tax revenue to help him politically. On Wednesday, drawing on those funds, Abbas paid about 160,000 civil servants and security-service officers, some of whom had not received full salaries in 17 months. The Palestinian Authority is not paying the salaries of an additional 31,000 employees who were hired on contracts over the past 20 months, most of them from Hamas. Fatah officials say these workers were hired illegally, although the decision is threatening to exacerbate the parties' divisions.

"Hamas will try to make use of it," said Bassem Barhoum, a spokesman for the Palestinian parliament. "But when most of them see how this works, and some get their salaries, it will probably be okay."

The markets of Nablus buzzed the day after government employees received their pay. Music filled the streets. Several shoppers and store owners said much of the pay would flow into banks, which have been lending money over the past year and a half to keep families afloat.

"We have not seen the results of the salaries yet," said Abdelrahman al-Nouri, 41, whose corner grocery store was empty despite heavy foot-traffic outside. "Some of them owe us a lot of money, and I hope they come in soon."

Mohammed Ishtayeh, 36, held a handful of shopping bags containing shoes, slacks and a dress shirt.

The middle school Arabic teacher received only half his monthly salary the previous day, despite government promises of the full amount. To buy clothes for his sister's wedding, he added to the $1,500 debt he has accumulated over the past year.

"The government owes me more than $3,000 in back pay," Ishtayeh said. "But this money was better than nothing."

Fatah on shaky ground in West Bank

Many are looking to the fractured Palestinian party to curb Hamas' reach, but some wonder whether it will be able to hang on to its stronghold.
By Ken Ellingwood
Times Staff Writer

July 6, 2007

RAMALLAH, WEST BANK — Routed in the Gaza Strip, the Fatah party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is fractured and adrift at a moment when it is viewed by the outside world as the best hope for blunting the militant Hamas movement in the West Bank.

Once dominant in Palestinian affairs, the organization long led by the late Yasser Arafat is beset by a weak and aging leadership, internal schisms and a widespread reputation among Palestinians as corrupt, ineffectual and out of touch. Those troubles have some Palestinians wondering whether Fatah is more likely to lose the West Bank than to recapture the Gaza Strip from Hamas.

The crisis facing Fatah has deepened since Hamas crushed its forces in Gaza last month, leaving Fatah's authority limited to the West Bank. The United States, Israel and European allies have promised to bolster Abbas, a relative moderate, and his party as a way to isolate Hamas.

Fatah ruled unchallenged under Arafat, but was sent reeling after his death when it lost to Hamas in parliamentary elections in January 2006. Fatah's calamitous military defeat in Gaza has heightened worries among members.

"I was shocked. I felt that Fatah was gone everywhere, in the West Bank and Gaza," said Rashad Abu Hamid, 27, a Fatah activist in the West Bank town of Hebron. "We realized there was a big gap between the base and the leadership."

The defeat has injected Abbas, 72, with uncharacteristic assertiveness, which he displayed by firing the Hamas-led government, naming an emergency Cabinet and signing a decree to disarm militias.

In Gaza, however, Hamas has ignored the government's dismissal. And few here believe Abbas is strong enough to take the guns from militia groups, including the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which is tied to Fatah but acts outside Abbas' control.

For their part, Fatah officials have responded to the Gaza loss by blaming one another, with little sign of serious reckoning at top levels over how to revive their beleaguered party. The leaders want early elections, though it is not clear that Fatah would win.

Hani Masri, a political analyst in the West Bank, said the Gaza defeat unmasked deep problems that bode ill for Fatah's lasting prospects in the West Bank, long the party's stronghold.

"It shows there is something wrong in leadership, administration, in the movement, in its forces, in its ideologies. And these problems exist in the West Bank," Masri said. "If Fatah does not learn from these mistakes, the West Bank will be similar to Gaza, even if it takes longer."

Masri said Fatah, long roiled by personality conflicts and turf battles, lost its sense of purpose after Arafat's death in November 2004.

"He was the glue for Fatah," Masri said. "When he left, the last thing uniting the movement was gone."

Ahmed Abdel Rahman, a Fatah spokesman, said the party was in shock after the bloody takeover in Gaza. But he said it would recover because of the appeal of its political program calling for an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

"It will be a long march," he said. "Fatah will not be defeated."

The resumption of Western aid will make it easier for Abbas to govern, but some Fatah members worry that his domestic standing could suffer if the Bush administration and Israel are seen as trying to prop him up.

Fatah was once a guerrilla movement and cornerstone of the Palestine Liberation Organization, but its dominance later made it virtually indistinguishable from the governing Palestinian Authority, created in 1994 by the Oslo interim peace accords.

The collapse of the peace process with Israel in the wake of the Palestinian uprising and disenchantment over graft and cronyism within the Palestinian Authority fed a voter backlash that enabled Hamas to win the 2006 elections under the banner of reform.

Fatah, which controlled the authority's security forces, resisted the power shift during months of on-and-off skirmishing in Gaza, Hamas' main base of support. But Fatah's aura of strength proved illusory, with top commanders fleeing Gaza amid the street battles and their fighting forces collapsing with stunning suddenness.

Fatah appears to boast a far more formidable armed force than Hamas does in the West Bank, but Fatah members fear that their party may disintegrate as a political force in the West Bank unless it takes steps to rejuvenate itself, starting with choosing new leaders.

"There is no vision for the future. There is no plan," said Kadoura Fares, a former Fatah lawmaker who has urged the party to hold a long-delayed convention to put fresh faces in the top roles.

The current leadership "will lead us to another big failure, which is the West Bank," said Fares, 45. "We will lose everything."

Fatah leaders, many of whom are in their 70s, have not groomed successors and have done much to lock younger members out. Mohammed Dahlan, a lawmaker in his mid-40s, has often been mentioned as a possible top leader, but his image has been hurt since the defeat in Gaza, where he was supposed to embody Fatah muscle.

Fares and some other activists say the best way to keep Hamas at bay in the West Bank is for Israel to release Marwan Barghouti, the jailed leader of the Palestinian uprising and a Fatah member.

Barghouti, who is serving five consecutive life terms for his role in attacks that killed five people, regularly emerges in polls as the most popular Palestinian political figure.

A recent poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that in a presidential vote, Barghouti would handily defeat Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, the fired prime minister, 59% to 35%.

Abbas, by contrast, would beat Haniyeh by 49% to 42%. The poll found that two of five voters would not participate in the elections if Abbas and Haniyeh were the candidates. That figure fell to less than a third if the candidates were Haniyeh and Barghouti.

Israel has consistently rebuffed calls to free Barghouti, though many Israelis expect that he will be released one day, perhaps as part of a peace agreement.

Fatah activists say their party has failed where Hamas has succeeded best: at the street level. Fatah focused on running government agencies while Hamas built grass-roots support through affiliated aid programs, community events and sympathetic clerics preaching its messages, former Fatah lawmaker Fares said.

"We think that it's enough that we are in power, that we use the power of the ministries to lead Palestinians forever," he said. "Hamas became strong under our umbrella."

Fares and other activists have launched a limited effort to rebuild Fatah through planned events in about 15 neighboring villages north of Ramallah. Organizers are forming committees to raise money for local events, including the revival of an annual Fatah banquet for high school students finishing year-end examinations.

Elsewhere in the West Bank, activists say fears that Hamas would impose a strict Islamic social code might help draw women to the more secular Fatah.

Jamal Abu Rob, a Fatah legislator from the West Bank town of Jenin, said the party needed an enlistment drive. But in a sign of disarray, it does not even have a list of enrolled members, he said.

Abu Rob, a former Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade leader, said gunmen would agree to Abbas' order to turn in weapons if Israel promised to stop pursuing them. Israeli forces have killed two Al Aqsa militants during West Bank raids in the last week after Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged support to Abbas.

Many Israelis believe it is only a matter of time until Abbas talks with Hamas to reach some form of accommodation, if not another full power-sharing arrangement. Israeli intelligence officials say Fatah supremacy in the West Bank is exaggerated, and many Palestinians agree.

Nashat Aqtash, an assistant professor of communications at Birzeit University, near Ramallah, said Fatah leaders made their biggest mistake in Gaza by underestimating Hamas.

"They are also miscalculating the power of Hamas in the West Bank," he said.

--

ellingwood@latimes.com

8 Hamas Militants Killed in Gaza Clashes

By IBRAHIM BARZAK
Associated Press Writer

7:42 AM PDT, July 5, 2007

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Israeli troops clashed with Hamas militants inside the Gaza Strip on Thursday, killing eight in fierce fighting that drew in Israeli aircraft, tanks and bulldozers.

It was the second-deadliest day of fighting between the two sides since the Islamic militant group wrested control of Gaza in mid-June. In all, more than 30 Palestinians -- nearly all of them militants but including a 12-year-old boy -- have been killed in at least five separate Israeli military operations in Gaza since the Hamas takeover.

Troops had ventured about a half-mile inside central Gaza on a routine foray against rocket squads when airmen backing their patrol identified a group of approaching militants, the army said.

The airmen opened fire on the Hamas fighters, sparking a shootout on the ground between the militants and the patrol, the army said.

Hamas spokesman Abu Obeida said its fighters started the battle by opening fire on an Israeli undercover unit.

Witnesses reported a heavy exchange of fire as Israeli tanks and bulldozers moved in, and soldiers took positions on rooftops. Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants hit back with small arms and mortars aimed at the Erez passenger crossing between Israel and Gaza. They also laid mines targeting the soldiers.

Two of the mortar shells landed on the Israeli side of the passage, which has been closed to most traffic since Hamas wrested control of Gaza last month, the army said. No one was injured, but the shells set off a fire in a road at the crossing, the army said.

Hospital officials said six militants were killed in the fighting, and Hamas said all belonged to its group. Among the dead was the Hamas field commander in central Gaza, Hamas TV said.

Israeli aircraft later dropped missiles at militant targets in the area, the army said. Hospital officials said two militants were killed in one of the airstrikes. Hamas said both were members of the group.

The fighting took place close to the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, a site of frequent clashes between gunmen and the Israeli army. Israeli troops arrested 18 militants, who were led away with their eyes blindfolded, the army said.

Deposed Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, and a spokesman for Fatah, Hamas' bitter rival, both condemned the Israeli operation and urged Palestinians to fight back.

"We assert that our people have the full right to defend themselves and to confront these aggressions," Haniyeh said.

Elsewhere, along Gaza's northern border with Israel, Hamas officials said some 15 tanks and three bulldozers had moved into Palestinian farms and were leveling the land. The army said it had no such vehicles in the area.

Meanwhile in Gaza City, some 400 Fatah civil servants were prevented from entering their offices as part of the power struggle between the moderate Fatah government in the West Bank and the Hamas rulers of Gaza. The territories have been functioning as separate entities since Hamas seized Gaza by force last month.

The Hamas-dictated work week in Gaza runs from Saturday to Wednesday, with Thursday and Friday assigned as the weekend. Salam Fayyad, the new Palestinian prime minister in the West Bank, recently announced the work week would run from Sunday through Thursday, as it does in Israel.

On Thursday, Hamas forces barred people from entering government offices, saying they were closed because it was the official weekend. Most Palestinian civil servants are loyal to Fatah.

"We told them that the government in Ramallah announced new weekend days but they said the people in Ramallah are not the government," said Imad, 40, an employee at the Public Works Ministry who refused to give his last name for fear of Hamas retribution.

"We are not coming on Saturday because its the official weekend. This is the beginning of the battle against the coup government in Gaza," he said.

Abu Dajana, a Hamas security officer, said the orders of the "legitimate government" in Gaza would be implemented.

On Wednesday, Gaza government employees loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah collected their first full salaries in 15 months. Civil servants who sided with Hamas' bloody takeover of Gaza were not paid.

The Press Faces Climate of Fear in Gaza

BBC correspondent Alan Johnston was freed by Hamas. But the media remains under fire in the chaotic territory—where reporters face attacks, censorship and a climate of fear.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Kevin Peraino
Newsweek
Updated: 2:15 p.m. ET July 5, 2007

July 5, 2007 - In the language of political spin doctors, the television images beamed around the world yesterday were the kind of "good optics" money can't buy. Alan Johnston, the BBC correspondent who had been held in Gaza for almost four months by a criminal gang, emerged from his captivity grinning, laughing and sharing his breakfast with Hamas's top political leaders. After seizing power in Gaza two weeks ago, the Islamists have been eager to try to convince the West—and particularly Europe—that they are the only ones who can bring law and order to the chaotic territory. Springing Johnston has been a goal from Day One, and the journalist seemed (understandably) grateful for the effort. "I'm pretty sure that if Hamas hadn't come in and put the heat on, I'd still be stuck in that room," Johnston told reporters yesterday.

But while Johnston's release may let foreign correspondents breathe a little easier in Gaza, hundreds of local Palestinian reporters are still wary. According to a new report by the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedom (PCDMF), more than 30 Palestinian journalists were attacked in Gaza and the West Bank last month, the highest in the territories' history. Already three reporters have been killed this year, compared with only one fatality in the preceding three years. Three radio stations were raided during the fighting in June, and Palestine TV, considered sympathetic to Fatah, has at least temporarily shuttered its Gaza operation. Late last week a prominent Gaza correspondent for the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya TV station fled to Norway with his family. The Hamas takeover "has had a terrible negative impact on the media," says Musa Rimawi, the director of the PCDMF. "Journalists are scared. They're panicking."

Freedom of the press is always a tricky proposition in the Middle East; here, as elsewhere, it belongs only to those who own one, as A.J. Liebling famously observed. Even in relatively liberal capitals like Beirut, media outlets tend to have close ties to political movements, or simply wealthy individuals. After seizing control of the Gaza Strip last month, the Islamists considered local TV and radio stations to be legitimate booty. To be sure, many of those who are complaining loudest now are simply Fatah publicists who have lost their cushy jobs and fear reprisals from long-held grudges. (Even before Hamas took over, Fatah security forces had been known to launch their own crackdowns on unfriendly commentators.)

Yet genuine advocates of press freedom have some legitimate fears. Correspondents I spoke with yesterday in Gaza said the only newspaper currently available there is the Hamas-run Fallastin. And Hamas's mass-media efforts have never been known for being particularly even-handed. One popular children's show, called "Tomorrow's Pioneers," stars a Mickey Mouse lookalike named Farfour, who urges kids to fight for "a world led by Islamists." The final episode last week featured Farfour being clubbed to death by an Israeli soldier.

Female correspondents in Gaza are particularly concerned about the new regime. After Johnston was released yesterday, I called Najah Awad, one of Gaza's best-known broadcast journalists. She hosts a show called "Family Journal" on Palestine TV. When the fighting broke out, she had been working on a documentary series called "My Body," about a woman who had been raped in Gaza. Awad describes herself as politically independent, but since the Islamists consider Palestine TV to be a Fatah mouthpiece, the station's 700 employees have mostly stayed away from the studio for fear of confrontations. Awad hasn't been to work since the fighting started, and has no immediate plans to return. Her documentary is on hold. "I sit at home," she told me. "I do nothing." She says a Hamas Web site recently accused the station's female broadcasters of being "loose women"—one more reason to stay away. To Awad, Johnston's release seems little more than a PR ploy. "Hamas is flexing its muscles for political reasons," she says. "I don't think they really care about Alan Johnston."

Still, Hamas leaders are politically savvy enough to know that the news media is one of their most effective weapons against Israel—and one that is virtually useless if Palestinian reporters are too scared to leave their homes. Often a single powerful photograph has been enough to rally international opinion or unite feuding factions. When 13-year-old Fares Odeh was photographed hurling a stone at an Israeli tank during the second intifada, the image quickly became iconic. (Yasir Arafat liked to tell audiences of children that they should try to be more like Odeh; Palestinian bureaucrats hung framed prints on office walls.) As the fighting intensified in September 2000, a series of pictures showing 12-year-old Mohammad Durra being shot to death in front of his father sparked an international outcry. Last spring, as Gaza degenerated into a low-grade civil war, only the heartbreaking image of a disconsolate Huda Ghalia—whose entire nuclear family had been wiped out during a beach picnic by what Palestinians say was an Israeli artillery shell—had the power to unite Hamas and Fatah loyalists. (Israel denied responsibility.)

Hamas leaders argue that the real danger to press freedom comes from small, radical splinter groups like the one that held Johnston—just the kind of organizations that would be likely to proliferate if the U.S. and Israel continue to isolate Hamas. Last month a previously unheard-of Islamist organization calling itself the "Swords of Truth" issued a leaflet threatening to behead female Palestinian broadcasters if they didn't start wearing headscarves. Najah Awad says she collapsed and had to be taken to the hospital when she heard about that threat. A senior Palestinian intelligence officer, who didn't want to be identified because his work is classified, told NEWSWEEK that he knows virtually nothing about the new group, which has also claimed credit for a series of attacks on Internet cafes and Christian bookstores. Hamas leaders have a point when they insist that they're more politically pragmatic than some of these renegade splinters. But Gaza's new rulers will need to be careful as they consolidate control over the territory's media outlets. Good photo-ops like the Johnston release are virtually useless, after all, if there are no longer any credible reporters there to record them.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19617377/site/newsweek/

Fatah officers go underground in Gaza

Hamas' victory in the Palestinian territory has sent its remaining rivals into hiding, where they quietly consider revenge or flight.
By Jeffrey Fleishman
Times Staff Writer

July 4, 2007

GAZA CITY — The street is quiet. Shoes click through the courtyard; the metal door opens. Gunfire from clan fighting echoes in alleys near the sea, but that is someone else's battle. Karam Tahar has his own struggles as he hides in the shade of his living room, a man caught on the wrong side in a dangerous city.

There are thousands of Palestinians like him. The recent bloodshed that swept through the Gaza Strip left Tahar's political party, Fatah, defeated by Hamas, an Islamic militant group that now controls the battered territory and its 1.5 million inhabitants. Tahar was a Fatah military intelligence officer, and now he says he is a target, even though Hamas has invited him and other Fatah police and security officials to work for it.

"How can I work with somebody from Hamas who one week ago was shooting at me? Who killed my colleagues?" Tahar said last week as his mother hovered nearby, telling him not to say too much. "How can I live with somebody who still thinks I'm a collaborator with Israel and the Americans?"

His mother cut in:

"We're afraid to go out. Maybe someone from the other side is watching our house, and they will tell Hamas and we'll all be in danger."

Suspicion and recrimination permeate the Palestinian Authority. Last month's fighting, which left dozens dead, gave Fatah control of the West Bank and Hamas over Gaza. Men like Tahar find themselves in a tangle of divided loyalties and fear about what to do when the balance of power shifts in a land of guns and retribution.

The Fatah-run police and security forces that once kept order in Gaza have been replaced with Hamas volunteers carrying Kalashnikovs and wearing gray fatigues and black shirts. Men and boys in bright green vests direct traffic. There is calm, but no sense of order. An eeriness has risen across the land; on the Gaza side of the Erez border crossing with Israel, there are no police or customs agents, only a few porters strolling through the stink and litter of an empty tunnel.

One of them whispered: "Fatah good. Hamas no good." He repeated it like a song.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was dismissed as prime minister by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, has promised more than 20,000 Fatah civil servants that they can return to their posts without reprisal. But few of them trust a man they have long despised. Those who may want to take such a chance — about 300 have reportedly returned — face pressure from Fatah officials, who want them to abandon their jobs in a strategy to undermine Hamas' credibility. "There is a threat to all Fatah ex-security people," said Tahar, who has a wife and a 2-year-old daughter. "Before the coup, I did my duty to help my country. But now I spend most of my days sleeping."

He glimpsed a crack of light between the curtains. "Something taken by force can only be regained through force. We must politically tighten the noose around Hamas. Things are quiet now because families are in shock over their dead.

"Hundreds were killed in the coup, and when the families wake they will start seeking revenge…. I can live like this for two or three more months, but after that I would think about leaving the country."

His destination, he said, is not known, but many who have fled Gaza, which these days has been virtually locked down by Israel, have ended up in the West Bank.

Beyond Tahar's courtyard walls and away from his neighborhood, the streets liven up a bit; funeral wreaths stand pretty in the sun, donkey carts rattle and spin, houses are scarred with shrapnel and armed men in pickup trucks bounce through the streets. Their sounds drift into a neighborhood Fatah office, where these days the pingpong table is silent and not many guys show up to sip afternoon tea below posters of the late Fatah leader Yasser Arafat.

Hatim is happy to talk as long as he doesn't have to give his last name. A sturdy man with close-cropped hair, Hatim was a Fatah security officer. Three of his friends were killed in the factional fighting.

"Hamas is trying to terrorize Fatah and the people of Gaza," Hatim said. "I'm not scared. I don't think there's a direct threat against my life. But I am careful. As a Fatah officer, the order I have is to rebuild the party in Gaza. We used to have 25 to 30 people in this center at a time. They'd smoke the water pipe and sit for hours. Now only about 10 come. We open it only in the evening."

A shopkeeper came and sat with Hatim; children played in the dirt outside. Hatim said he believes Abbas will win back what Fatah has lost, but he is also troubled that Palestinians are fighting one another instead of staying unified against Israel.

Hatim is not eloquent when it comes to politics, he just knows that he had a job and now he doesn't, and he can't figure out how to stop Hamas.

"We will not turn into some sort of militant gang," he said of Fatah. "But I know I will not leave Gaza under any circumstances, even if there's a threat against my life."

He rose from his chair, told the shopkeeper goodbye. He closed the center's door. It had been painted with graffiti bearing the name of the Hamas military brigade. It was a threat, a taunt, a way of marking the territory of a new order. He turned away and headed down the alley, barely noticing the faint pop of Kalashnikovs echoing from another clan fight somewhere in the city.

jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com

Dealing with Iran

Today's Washington Post has two very interesting articles on American policy toward Iran. The first discusses the Bush Administration's moves to make its Iran policy less about public denouncements of the Iranian government and more about effective limitations on Iran's reach.

Of course, the story appears to be part of a larger - and largely anonymous - Administration effort to show that it is dealing with Iran effectively and not just breathing fire.

The second addresses Administration problems with Iran's mixed approach to Al Qaeda. Iran is capturing some Al Qaeda operatives traveling through Iran but some very major players are under nominal "house arrest." The Bush Administration is pushing hard to marginalize Iran and is trying to use Iran's failure to cooperate regarding these Al Qaeda members against it.

The Bush Administration wants to use this lack of cooperation to leverage Europe and Security Council members to take steps against Iran by pointing to their support for terrorists - Al Qaeda, Iraqi militias (and Hamas and Hezbollah, etc.). As the article shows, the Bush Administration's unwillingness to adhere to basic norms for detention means that we cannot gain custody of wanted terrorists.

You wonder whether a different Administration would have the guts to implement a strategy advanced by the perceptive Vali Nasr and Ray Tayekh -- constructive engagement with Iran to marginalize its clerical rulers. I think this merits a full and honest analysis.