Gaza's New Strongmen

Jamal Abu Samhadana meets visitors in a narrow first-floor room in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah, in a dwelling lit only by a small, battery-powered fluorescent strip. He proffers a misshapen right hand for a shake. Shrapnel from an Israeli tank shell broke Abu Samhadana's forearm in 2001. His hand looks caved in, his wrist bends grotesquely and his skin is unnaturally smooth and hairless, as though the limbs had been melted. For a tough guy like Abu Samhadana, such disfigurements are badges of authenticity. "Luckily," he says, "I shoot with my left hand."

Although rarely seen in public, Abu Samhadana is emerging as the most powerful figure in this flash-point town on the border between Gaza and Egypt, where the intifadeh was at its most murderous. As the founder of an armed militia called the Salah ed-Din Brigades, he commands 2,000 gunmen who since 2001 have fought deadly battles with Israeli forces patrolling the border. But now that Israel has pulled its troops and civilians out of Gaza and turned over responsibility for the area to the Palestinian Authority, Abu Samhadana and his troops have a new target: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his security services, who are struggling to impose order in Gaza, home to 1.5 million Palestinians. Abbas' predecessor, Yasser Arafat, used to send Abu Samhadana $10,000 a month, but Abbas ended those payments in February. Without such support, Abu Samhadana's army is filled with jobless (and armed) men who have been expressing their frustration by going on a spree of kidnappings and assassinations. "Gaza is in security chaos," says Abu Samhadana. "Every Palestinian citizen is in danger."

For Palestinians, the elation that accompanied Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip has been replaced by fear that a bloody struggle will erupt between Abbas' security services and the myriad armed groups proliferating in the Palestinian territories. Abbas has had limited success in persuading the Islamist group Hamas to halt rocket attacks against Israel. But his more troublesome quandary is how to deal with militia leaders like Abu Samhadana, who nominally belong to Abbas' Fatah party but operate outside anyone's control. U.S. officials estimate that there are 3,000 Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank who consider themselves leaders of militias like the Salah ed-Din Brigades, although most are much less powerful than Abu Samhadana. The Palestinian Authority's 30,000 police and soldiers in the Gaza Strip say they lack the capacity to disarm such groups. In an open show of their frustration, 50 police officers fired guns in the air and interrupted a meeting of the Palestinian parliament in Gaza City last week to plead for more firepower. Some Palestinians fear that Gaza is descending into violent anarchy. "It's a Mafia situation," says Saeb al-Ajez, who resigned as chief of Palestinian police in February to protest the lawlessness. "Law is cast aside. Everyone wants to show his muscles."