The Gangs of Gaza

[Behind the Aegis]

June 26, 2006 issue - 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.

Israeli officials have left little doubt about which side they back. Israel's goal is "to topple , 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."

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[barb162]

1. This is a really excellent article

not so much chaos as a kind of low-grade war