Since the takeover of Gaza last June moderate Arab and international states have moved forcefully to isolate Hamas and abort the emergence of a fundamentalist regime in the coastal enclave.
This isolation has crippled Hamas’ ability to face the increasing problems in Gaza and has also inflamed tension and disagreement among its leaders over future policy and the control of power within the party.
Disagreements has surfaced between the movement’s moderate leadership, led by deposed prime minister Isma’il Haniyya, and the hard-line leadership, whose most prominent representatives are Hamas co-founder Mahmoud Al-Zahhar and the Damascus-based Khalid Mash’al.
Fearing a dramatic collapse of the Hamas regime in Gaza, Haniyya believes that dialogue with the Fatah rival is the only way to end the party’s isolation in Gaza.
Haniyya became prime minister in February 2006, following the January election that gave his political party a majority of seats in parliament.
During the first 18 months following the election victory, Haniyya and other moderate leaders took an incremental approach toward official integration into the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to strengthen the party’s central role in Palestinian society.
Mash’al, who masterminds the group from the outside, and Zahhar, a hard-line leader in Gaza, have espoused different strategies, combining a vision for the establishment of an Islamic state in all of Palestine and an agenda that takes into account some Arab and Islamic states’ interests, said Tala Okal, a political expert based in Gaza.
The divisions among Hamas leaders have become blurred since Hamas’ electoral victory and the formation of the cabinet, he said. The hard-line leaders were against the Saudi-sponsored Mecca deal, which led to a short-lived unity government, and they planned the Gaza takeover to undermine it. After the Gaza seizure, the hardline leaders made tremendous efforts to show that Hamas was capable of ruling Gaza and bring stability and security to the people, who, they say, have suffered under the corrupt Fatah leadership.
To achieve this purpose they proposed a long-term hudna – the religious expression for truce – with Israel as part of a deal to stop the firing of Qassam rockets in return for Israel easing up the siege of Gaza and opening the border terminals.
The differences over what happened in Gaza have created a power crisis among Hamas leaders, especially Haniyya and Zahhar. This conflict has escalated into armed clashes among their loyalists in different areas in Gaza.
“The difference is over shaping the movement’s future policy and relations with other Palestinian factions, especially Fatah,” Okal said.
The escalation was fueled after Zahhar ordered the armed militia to punish Haniyya for his repeated calls for talks with Fatah, and by his readiness to meet with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas for another Mecca deal under Saudi auspices, according to Okal.
Although those clashes are considered part of a power struggle within Hamas, they have also revealed a serious crisis facing the movement in its effort to strengthen its nascent Islamic regime in Gaza.
Recent news reports quoted Hamas sources as saying that communication between the leadership inside the country and in exile had ceased, and describing the current situation as a “slow suicide” for Hamas because of the siege and the movement’s inability to meet the basic needs of 1.5 million people living in Gaza.
Externally, Hamas is facing a multi-faceted crisis regarding the group’s political agenda, the absence of dialogue with Fatah, and the increasingly serious problems within the Gaza Strip, said Okal.
“Ideologically, Hamas was an Islamic movement created as an armed guerrilla group to fight Israel and not to run Gaza. Hamas’ armed militias have turned into police forces to maintain law and order,” he added.
He explained further that Hamas’ conflict was an agenda crisis. It could not continue as a resistance group fighting Israel and at the same time rule Gaza politically and economically.
The pressure on Hamas by Arab states and other international countries to reverse its “coup” and hand back security installations to P.A. has worsened the situation, he said.
“Every day Hamas becomes more isolated in Gaza” where almost 80 percent of the people are living on daily handouts, resulting from a sharp drop in food and medicine supplies due to the closure of the terminals with Israel.
Eventually, all Hamas attempts to preserve its regime in Gaza will run into a brick wall, Okal said.
“This crisis will create more serious differences and disagreements that certainly threaten the very existence of the movement,” Okal concluded.