Hamas in Gaza (merged thread)

[SWJED]

Reported in multiple news outlets and dsicussed on various blogs...

Here is the 14 June article from the Australian - Hamas 'Mined Gaza Beach'.

An Israeli army investigation into the explosion on a Gaza beach last Friday that killed seven members of a Palestinian family has concluded it was almost certainly caused by a Palestinian mine, not an Israeli shell, according to the Israeli media yesterday.

The military wing of Hamas had seized on the deaths to declare an end to its ceasefire with Israel, and a resumption of large-scale hostilities between Palestinian militants and Israel seemed possible.

However, it was unclear whether the Israeli findings on the beach blast would be credible to the Palestinians.

Israel, which expressed regret for the deaths, was initially inclined to accept an artillery shell was responsible, because Israeli warships fired six shells in the area. The impact of five was observed hundreds of metres from the beach, but the sixth shell was unaccounted for.

However, suspicions of a possible other cause were aroused when it was learned Hamas operatives had scoured the area and taken away pieces of shrapnel. Shrapnel was also removed from the bodies of the wounded brought to Israeli hospitals.

Israel's Channel Two television said shrapnel was found in a wounded child brought to Israel, and it was not the metal used in artillery shells.

The Haaretz daily reported that photographs of the crater on the beach suggested it was caused by an explosion from below, not a hit from above...

[Steve Blair]

The BBC story is here.

They included a comment from Human Rights Watch that is interesting:

An expert working for the Human Rights Watch said the Palestinians' injuries were not consistent with a blast taking place beneath them.

"It has been suggested by some that the family was killed by a land mine, and this is patently not the case," Mark Garlasco said.

"All of the evidence is pointing to a 155mm shell as having killed and injured the Palestinians here on the beach," he said.

"My assessment [is] that it's likely that this was incoming artillery fire that landed on the beach and was fired by the Israelis from the north of Gaza."

If this is a Hamas IO, it's already turning out brilliantly.

[SWJED]

IDF Says it's Not Responsible for Gaza Beach Blast.

"The IDF is innocent," was the bottom line that came out of a press conference Tuesday night, during which Defense Minister Amir Peretz, Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz and other top officers presented the findings of an internal military investigation into Friday's explosion that killed seven Palestinians as they picnicked on a Gaza beach.

In a press conference at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, Peretz told reporters that following an extensive three-day investigation the IDF had collected sufficient evidence to prove that Friday's explosion was not caused by Israel. The evidence was being presented first and foremost to the Israeli people, Peretz emphasized, saying, "We owe it to ourselves to know that we did not cause these deaths."

"We have sufficient evidence which confirms our suspicion that the attempts to portray this incident as caused by Israel were wrong," Peretz said. "I know it is difficult to explain this, but the facts that have accumulated prove that Israel was not behind the incident."

In contrast to daily Palestinian rocket attacks against Israel, Peretz added, the IDF made great efforts to avoid harming innocent Palestinians. "In all IDF operations one of the issues that is taken into consideration and sometimes adds risk to ourselves is the need to not cause harm to innocent civilians," the defense minister said...

[SWJED]

MERMI - TV (H/T Little Green Footballs) - Hamas 'Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades - Training and Ideology (video) and transcript.

Here’s a look at the war preparations of Hamas that aired on Al Jazeera on July 4th, 2006, boasting about the capabilities of Hamas’s hardcore terrorist unit, the Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades. JihadTV shows us the terrorists building tunnels, making grenades, launching Qassam rockets, mixing explosives, and manufacturing RPGs, and there are interviews with various soldiers and commanders including Muhammad Al-Deif (recently injured in an IAF airstrike), “General Commander” and Ahmad Al-Ja’bari, “Most Prominent Al-Qassam Brigades commander.” (Courtesy of MEMRI TV.)

[Strickland]

I would also recommend researching one of their former commanders and head bomber maker - Yehiya Ayyash for further insights.

[tequila]

al-Jazeera interviews both Fatah and Hamas fighters. Interesting look at the motivations behind the growing civil war in Palestine between the factions. I see wine glasses clinking in Tel Aviv and Washington, D.C., especially in the light of this, though I think in the end this will come back to bite us all in the end. Have we forgotten the origins of Hizbullah?

[Jedburgh]

The Economist, 3 Feb 07: The Gazafication of the West Bank

...As the PA crumbles under fratricidal conflict and the pressure of foreign economic sanctions, the lawlessness has prompted the powerful Palestinian clans (which are not generally loyal to any one party) to see to their own security. Nablus's Dweikat clan recently posted flyers warning that it will retaliate for any attacks on members of the extended family, and has drawn up a list of young armed men that it can call on.

That is a recipe for something nasty. A clan like the Dweikats, with 30,000 members, can be a militia in itself. Clan feuds now drive a lot of the seemingly political fighting in Gaza, and they seem to be intensifying in the West Bank too. Aid workers in Hebron, the main town in the southern bit of the West Bank, say that political clashes there are still rare but arms prices have rocketed, as people buy more guns to protect themselves. In December the police shooting of a teenager prompted his relatives to burn down the police station and kidnap several officers, whose own families then sent in reinforcements, leading to a stand-off that took a week and the intervention of presidential troops to end....

[tequila]

Mystery Islamists attacking Palestinian businesses. A symptom of Hamas' inability to control its factions?

[SWJED]

31 May NY Times - Jihadist Groups Fill a Palestinian Power Vacuum by Steven Erlanger and Hassan Fattah.

... A standoff between the Lebanese Army and Islamists at a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon has focused attention on a jihadist element taking root there as well as a radicalization in the Palestinian areas themselves.

With the fragmentation of authority in Gaza, and its isolation, said a Gazan analyst, Taysir Mhaisin, “there is an increase of fundamentalism and the birth of groups believing in violence and practicing violence as a model created by bin Ladenism.”

Mouin Rabbani, a Jordan-based analyst of Palestinian politics for the International Crisis Group, said, “There is a security vacuum that creates space for all kinds of new grouplets and forces.”...

[AdmiralAdama]

Interesting take on this from Richard Fernandez at the Belmont Club. Claims that the "peace process" -- as well as a "Palestinian proto-state" is in the balance.

http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/...aza-again.html

Gaza again
Hamas and Fatah were hard at it again today with Hamas attempting a big, decisive push that will leave them in de facto control of all the major military facilities on the strip. Hospitals have now become battlegrounds.

In the European Hospital in the town of Khan Yunis, Hamas-affiliated security guards used the hospital's roof as a staging ground for an assault on a nearby Fatah position on Tuesday, head of nursing Atta al-Jaabari said.

The assault caused a "state of panic" among the medical staff and threatened children at a kindergarten for employees' children on the grounds, he said. Doctors treated three of the wounded as the battle continued.

... Meanwhile in other news, "the European Union resumed aid to the Palestinian finance ministry yesterday, for the first time since the West launched an economic boycott of the Islamist Hamas government more than a year ago," according to Agence Presse France.

Only a few months ago, Hamas and Fatah factions met in Riyadh and swore by all that was holy to bury the hatchet to form a unity government. No one bothered to inquire where the hatchet would be buried. Two things are at issue in the Hamas-Fatah war. The first is the future of the "peace process". The second is the future of Palestine. The viability of the "peace process" descended from the Oslo Agreement is hanging by the most slender of fictions. A Hamas victory or fight to a draw would to all intents and purposes not only smash the "peace process" but all the diplomatic schemes which view the solution of the Israeli-Palestinian process as the heart of a solution. With the prospect of a peace with Israel taken off the table the risk of resort to war increases. What is worse is that "Palestine", if it ever existed as a viable proto-state, risks becoming fragmented among terrorist groups, each with its own external patrons. It is being divided into spheres of influence presided over by terror organizations acting as proxies for rogue states.

Of course the facts may make no difference at all. As the recent EU funds transfer underscores, the Left is already in a zombie-like trance with respect to this issue. Lips will continue to move, checks will continue to be written and limbs appear to move as if controlled by volition, but it's all on automatic. Any acknowledgement of reality will precipitate its complete collapse in certain ideologues, if that makes any sense.

[SWJED]

13 June NY Times - Attacks Escalate as Palestinians Fight for Power by Steven Erlanger and Isabel Kershner.

Gunmen of rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah sharply escalated their fight for supremacy on Tuesday, with Hamas taking over much of the northern Gaza Strip in what is beginning to look increasingly like a civil war.

Five days of revenge attacks on individuals — including executions, kneecappings and even tossing handcuffed prisoners off tall apartment towers — on Tuesday turned into something larger and more organized: attacks on symbols of power and the deployment of military units. About 25 Palestinians were killed and more than 100 wounded, Palestinian medics said...

[SoiCowboy]

Gaza's been a dump since at least the 1980s.

First Intifada showed them that violence as a way of life is A-OK.

And they've been doing it ever since, because to do anything else means you're just another unemployed bum in a failed statelet rather than a holy warrior of God / military muscleman.

Everyone should stop funding the Palestinians, and let Hamas bankrupt itself trying to fix the strip and the PLO/Fatah disintergrate from lack of patronage.

[Jedburgh]

The Economist, 13 Jun 07: The Road to Hamastan

By the end of this week, the Islamists of Hamas will have either destroyed the secular-minded Fatah in the Gaza Strip, or at least shown that they can. The relative quiet after a deadly burst of violence between the rival Palestinian parties in May was broken by a series of ###-for-tat killings that quickly got out of hand. After troops from the presidential guard of Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, fired rockets at the house of Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister, the Islamist party launched a full-scale attack. Hamas troops have taken control of most of the Gaza Strip and have chased Fatah forces out of their bases, while several top Fatah commanders have either fled Gaza or been killed....

[AdmiralAdama]

When tracing back the roots of the terrible Jihadist violence and anarchy swamping Gaza, this is a timely article -- about Arafat's vile leadership.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200509/samuels

Arafat's failure to conquer Jerusalem did not shatter his conviction that history was moving in his favor: under pressure from within and without, isolated in the world, the State of Israel would eventually crack apart and dissolve, to be replaced by Arab Palestine. "We will continue our struggle until a Palestinian boy or a Palestinian girl waves our flag on the walls, mosques, and churches of Jerusalem, the capital of our independent state, whether some people are happy about it or not," he promised. "He who doesn't like it may drink the water of the Dead Sea." Arafat understood his actions as part of an unfolding within the long duration of historical time rather than as disembodied headlines on CNN. The inability of his diplomatic interlocutors to understand what he was driving at exposed the fatal limits of the Western conception of politics as a way to find a happy medium between competing interests.

...

Nofal tells me that Arafat's strategic use of violence after Oslo began with permitting Hamas and Islamic Jihad to launch terror attacks. Arafat would then crack down on those same organizations to show that he was in control. Nofal first heard Arafat give orders that led directly to violence, he says, before the riots that erupted over the excavation of the Hasmonean tunnel, near the Haram al-Sharif, in 1996. Nofal says that the impetus for the violence was the statement by the newly elected Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that he would not speak to Arafat directly. Arafat was furious at the slight.

"I was with him in his office," Nofal recalls. "He got up and walked around the desk. He was very, very angry. Finally he calmed down a bit and he pointed to the phone on his desk. He said, 'I will make Netanyahu call me on this phone.'"

Arafat ordered demonstrators into the streets, and told them to provoke the Israelis. When violence erupted, the Israelis were blamed. ...

[SWJED]

19 June NY Times commentary - Brothers to the Bitter End by Fouad Ajami.

So the masked men of Fatah have the run of the West Bank while the masked men of Hamas have their dominion in Gaza. Some see this as a tolerable situation, maybe even an improvement, envisioning a secularist Fatah-run state living peacefully alongside Israel and a small, radical Gaza hemmed in by Israeli troops. It’s always tempting to look for salvation in disaster, but in this case it’s sheer fantasy.

The Palestinian ruin was a long time in coming. No other national movement has had the indulgence granted the Palestinians over the last half-century, and the results can be seen in the bravado and the senseless violence, in the inability of a people to come to terms with their condition and their needs.

The life of a Palestinian is one of squalor and misery, yet his leaders play the international game as though they were powers. An accommodation with Israel is imperative — if only out of economic self-interest and political necessity — but the Palestinians, in a democratic experiment some 18 months ago, tipped power to a Hamas movement whose very charter is pledged to the destruction of the Jewish state and the imposition of Islamist rule...

[SWJED]

18 June The New Republic commentary - Frame Work by Dennis Ross.

In January, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice proclaimed her seriousness about trying to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. She declared that she had heard the calls of many of her colleagues internationally for the United States to become active again and push for Middle East peace. Since then, she has taken four trips to the region and met with her Quartet partners numerous times to promote agreement on a political horizon for the Israelis and Palestinians--an agreement on the contours of a permanent status settlement.

With the collapse of Fatah forces in Gaza, however, that horizon seems more distant than ever. Hamastan appears to describe the reality there now, making questions about permanent status or concessions to refugees largely irrelevant for the time being. We should not yet give up on the idea of brokering a comprehensive ceasefire between the Israelis and Palestinians, but the focus now must shift to the competition between Fatah and Hamas...

[SWJED]

19 June Washington Post commentary - 'West Bank First': It Won't Work by Robert Malley and Aaron David Miller.

Having embraced one illusion -- that it could help isolate and defeat Hamas -- the Bush administration is dangerously close to embracing another: Gaza is dead, long live the West Bank. This approach appears compelling. Flood the West Bank with money, boost Fatah security forces and create a meaningful negotiating process. The Palestinian people, drawn to a recovering West Bank and repelled by the nightmare of an impoverished Gaza, will rally around the more pragmatic of the Palestinians.

The theory is a few years late and several steps removed from reality. If the United States wanted to help President Mahmoud Abbas, the time to do so was in 2005, when he won office in a landslide, emerged as the Palestinians' uncontested leader and was in a position to sell difficult compromises to his people. Today, Abbas is challenged by far more Palestinians and is far less capable of securing a consensus on any important decision.

But the more fundamental problem with this theory is its lack of grounding. It is premised on the notion that Fatah controls the West Bank. Yet the West Bank is not Gaza in reverse. Unlike in Gaza, Israel's West Bank presence is overwhelming and, unlike Hamas, Fatah has ceased to exist as an ideologically or organizationally coherent movement. Behind the brand name lie a multitude of offshoots, fiefdoms and personal interests...

[Jedburgh]

The Economist, 18 Jun 07: After the Showdown

....there are some signs that the split between Hamas and Fatah could prove less devastating than pessimists fear. One reason is that the clashes in Gaza may have been, in part, Hamas settling scores against an individual, Mohammed Dahlan, a reviled Fatah strongman, rather than a Hamas attempt to destroy Fatah as a whole. Hamas members always hated Mr Dahlan, who was Yasser Arafat’s security chief in Gaza in the 1990s. The forces under his command were responsible for arresting and torturing many Hamas militants. In last week’s fighting Mr Dahlan’s house and offices were looted and destroyed and many of his henchmen fled (he had left Gaza two months before for an operation). Now that they have gone, the tension may yet ease a little.

Mr Dahlan may have been a big part of the problem. Other Fatah leaders, such as Ahmed Hallis, the group’s secretary-general in Gaza and a man who harboured a thinly disguised contempt for Mr Dahlan, managed to stay behind when many top Fatah folk fled in fear for their lives. He is now reportedly in talks with Hamas. In addition, Hamas's leaders are trying to achieve the release of a kidnapped BBC journalist, Alan Johnston, who has been held for months. If they succeed they would hope to demonstrate they have genuine control of Gaza, after the chaos of the past few months.

Hamas is not entirely united. Ismail Haniyeh, who was prime minister until last week, has angrily rejected Mr Abbas’s authority to fire him. But Khaled Meshal, a Hamas leader based in Damascus, appears keener on reconciliation with Fatah, saying late last week that “what is needed now is to deal with the Palestinian schism”. Mr Meshal opposes any attempt to hive off the Gaza Strip from the West Bank. It seems Hamas is not yet ready to strike out on its own. Mr Abbas too will be reluctant to acquiesce in cutting off Gaza altogether. Some kind of rapprochement may yet be in the offing.

[JeffC]

DEBKAfile Exclusive: Hamas to release files on Palestinian intelligence collaboration with the US CIA, UK’s MI5 and Shin Bet

June 23, 2007, 10:32 PM (GMT+02:00)

The centerpiece is evidence of the Palestinian Authority Preventive Security service’s disclosure that Hamas’ elite undercover Unit 102, only 25 strong, underwent lengthy training in Iran in advanced combat tactics modeled on those of the US Seals and the Israel Navy’s Shayetet 13.

DEBKAfile’s military sources add: Unit 102 operated under such deep cover that even the commanders of Hamas’ military wing and its Executive Force did not know it existed. Hamas is making good on its threat to use the huge archive of Palestinian Authority intelligence documents it captured in Gaza to compromise Mahmoud Abbas and members of his regime and show them up as minions of foreign powers and traitors to Palestinian national interests.

I have a few other sources for this story at my blog, as well.

[Jedburgh]

The Economist, 21 Jun 07: June Amazed Them

June amazed us on its fortieth anniversary: if we do not find someone to defeat us again, we defeat ourselves with our own hands so as not to forget!

....a lot of Palestinians wonder if this is the death-knell of their dream of statehood. The foreigners' optimistic scenario—that Hamas will cave in and give up control of Gaza—is far from guaranteed. Permanent separation between a chaotic, violent Gaza Strip and a more prosperous West Bank seems a real possibility. The title of Mr Darwish's poem sounds an almost biblical warning: “From now on you are not yourself!”