0.cached.png
By Kevin Peraino
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
At first, the threats trickling in to the Palestinian intelligence headquarters in Gaza seemed like childish pranks. Operatives chuckled about a Hamas-run Web site featuring a caricature of their boss, intel chief Tareq Abu Rajab: the Islamists had digitally grafted an image of a dog's head onto the Fatah loyalist's body. But then intelligence agents eavesdropping on a Hamas radio frequency intercepted a transmission that seemed deadly serious. "On Friday," a voice crackled in Arabic, "the dog will die."
Abu Rajab's security detail kept the boss away from the office that Friday. But the next morning, May 20, the intel chief stepped into his private elevator and punched the button for the fourth floor. A moment after the doors clamped shut, at 10:10 a.m., a bomb blast ripped a hole in the elevator's steel doors, spewing fire and a dense cloud of ash into the hallway. Choking on the stench of burning hair, Haitham Hamid, one of Abu Rajab's bodyguards, crawled toward the elevator. He discovered the corpse of another bodyguard dangling from his ankles in the shaft. Abu Rajab himself had survived the explosion, tumbling down the well to the ground floor, where he was injured but somehow still alive. As a convoy later rushed Abu Rajab to the hospital, Hamid glimpsed a blur of bearded militants spraying the cars with gunfire. "I knew immediately," Hamid later recalled to NEWSWEEK, "this could only be Hamas."
Abu Rajab is still recovering in a Cairo hospital. But in the month since the bombing, the conflict between Fatah security officials like Abu Rajab and their Islamist antagonists in Hamas has grown increasingly bloody. More than two dozen security personnel have been killed in civil violence over the past month, and last week the International Crisis Group issued a dire report predicting that Gaza is one step from "all-out chaos." If assassins succeed in killing even one high-ranking political figure, then "you'll be able to hear the bullets in the States," says a senior Palestinian intelligence official, who requested anonymity in order to avoid becoming a target himself.
Read More on News
Israeli officials have left little doubt about which side they back. Israel's goal is "to topple [Hamas], to bring about regime change," according to a senior Israeli security source, who requested anonymity in order to keep his job. Last week Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced that he had approved the shipment of small arms--reportedly hundreds of American-made M-16 rifles--from Jordan to President Mahmoud Abbas's Force 17 guards. Reuters reported that Abbas's guards had also received four new armored vehicles, worth roughly $100,000 each. (Abbas aides deny receiving any weapons or vehicles.) "We want to strengthen Abu Mazen so that he will be able to cope with Hamas," Olmert told reporters in London. "We are running out of time."
Yet at least some Israeli officials worry that war preparations sometimes develop a ruthless logic of their own. Once unleashed, chaos is hard to rein in. "If Hamas falls, who exactly is going to take over?" asks the Israeli security official. Publicly endorsing arms shipments to Abbas only reinforces the view that Fatah politicians are corrupt tools of Israeli masters--one of the issues that brought Hamas to power in the first place. "We have to be very careful ... not to present [Abbas] as an Israeli collaborator," says Ami Ayalon, a former director of Israel's Shin Bet intelligence agency. Talking openly about arms shipments is a "huge mistake," he says. "I do not understand this logic."
Fatah and Hamas are still engaged in talks to avert a civil war and reach an agreement on how to deal with Israel on terms that will satisfy the international community. Popular sentiment is behind that process, and many in Gaza believe that tribal and family ties will help prevent a full-blown conflagration. Khaled Abu Hilal, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, insists that "every family has members of both Fatah and Hamas." Yet Abu Hilal also keeps a 9mm Smith & Wesson in his desk drawer--just in case. And a Palestinian arms dealer in Ramallah, who wished to remain anonymous as he offered to sell NEWSWEEK an unsolicited MP5 submachine gun, says that the price of a U.S.-made M-16 on the black market has doubled, from $5,000 to $10,000, since Hamas took power. "Hamas is buying like crazy," the dealer says.
Both sides have been beefing up their militias and making other preparations. NEWSWEEK has learned that Abu Rajab's intelligence directorate has begun training 500 elite new troops recruited from the ranks of Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militia loyal to Fatah. The Gaza-based security unit, known as the secret-police "executive force," will be tasked with protecting the organization's leaders, as well as gathering intelligence, according to three Palestinian intel sources who didn't want to be identified discussing operations.
The current conflict began in earnest just one week after the new Hamas government took power in late March. Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh had tapped Hamas loyalist Said Sayam to be the Palestinian Authority's Interior minister, technically in command of the PA's best security forces. But just a week later, on April 6, Abbas appointed his own man, Rashid Abu Shbak, to the newly created position of "director of internal security"--essentially making him a shadow Interior minister. Hamas responded by deploying its own militia in Gaza, which quickly began clashing with Abu Shbak's Preventive Security forces.
Assassins came for Abu Shbak the morning after the failed attempt on Abu Rajab at intelligence headquarters. It wasn't the first time somebody had tried to kill Abu Shbak, but "I never get used to it," he told NEWSWEEK later, as he sat slumped in a big leather chair in his Gaza City office. The window shades were tightly drawn, presumably to blind the same would-be assassin who buried a massive roadside bomb beneath a mound of sand near the end of Abu Shbak's driveway on May 21. This time the security chief's bodyguards discovered and defused the device before his attacker could trigger a remote detonator. But the determination of this latest stalker had Abu Shbak on edge. The 150-pound charge was "enough to blow up a tank," he said.
Abu Shbak may not like being a target, but his Preventive Security men are well known for using hardball tactics, too. A squad of Preventive Security troopers who harass people in Gaza has become known popularly as the "death squad." Hamas members believe the unit was formed specifically to crack down on them. Twenty-year-old Salah Gdeih, a member of Hamas's Izzedine al-Qassam militia, says he was walking with fellow militants last month in the Gaza neighborhood of Khan Younis when 10 masked men jumped him. They put a black bag over his head, stuffed him and his cousin Salem into the trunk of a car, and drove off. Once the car reached a secluded grove, the kidnappers, whom Gdeih believes were members of Preventive Security, forced him to lie on his stomach. Then they beat him with pipes, hammers and a thick hose. "They were hitting me and cursing at the same time," Gdeih later recalled at his home in a Khan Younis refugee camp. The men then broke his cousin Salem's jaw before they shot him dead.
By the time Gdeih finished telling his story to a NEWSWEEK reporter, a crowd of several dozen relatives had gathered to listen. A discussion broke out about Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, killed that morning in Iraq. The family patriarch, 58-year-old Abdullah Gdeih, denounced the Qaeda leader, criticizing the terrorist for killing fellow Muslims. But then a younger man poked his head into the room. Twenty-three-year-old Fadi Gdeih said he disagreed with the older man. "We need somebody like that here," Fadi said of Zarqawi. "Somebody who slits throats." There are some who think that a Hamas-led government is as bad as it gets. They might want to think again.
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines