How Hamas turned on Palestine's 'traitors'

It started as a well-planned settling of scores between rival political factions. But by the end of last week Palestinians seemed on the brink of civil war as two conflicting governments vowed to defeat each other

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"The first intimation something was different about the explosion of violence in Gaza between the forces of the government Islamist party Hamas and the Fatah fighters of President Mahmoud Abbas came with a no-show.

A week ago, as four senior Fatah officials sat down with Egyptian mediators hoping to negotiate an end to months of spiralling violence, a message arrived from Hamas that it would not be coming. A resurgence in fighting between the two sides made it too dangerous to travel to the meeting.

It was not true. Tired of the endless round of street battles and tit-for-tat assassinations between the two sides, which since the election of Hamas early last year had brought Gaza to the brink of anarchy, the leaders of Hamas had in mind a different solution to Gaza's corrosive security crisis: a definitive attack on the faction inside Fatah it blamed for the escalating violence. Hamas was planning for war, not peace, and the target would be the security institutions still controlled by Fatah and Abbas, which had been bolstered by US funds.

Discreetly, Hamas had forged links with members and former members of Fatah with whom it was happy to deal. It had drawn up a list of buildings belonging to the security forces of Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, to be overrun, and lists of Fatah loyalists it blamed for the murder of Hamas members. Finally, it had briefed journalists on the Hamas-controlled television channel al-Aqsa TV on the message to broadcast to Gaza's 1.4 million people to reassure them, as the fighting turned from clashes to an all-out assault on Fatah-held positions.

It was a message that would dramatically underline the nature of last week's assault. It was not an attack on Fatah, the broadcasts would insist, or Gaza's people. Instead, those under attack, the supporters of Gaza's head of the Preventive Security Force, Mohammed Dahlan, were 'collaborators with Israel and the US and traitors."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2105006,00.html