Trouble All Around

There is nothing like a tour of Gaza City to show the clash of styles between the old Palestinian guard and Hamas, the Islamic militant group that swept January's legislative elections. First stop: the gabled, stone mansion of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, high walled and with enough guards to protect Fort Knox. Next: the residence of Ismail Haniya, the newly designated Prime Minister. Haniya, 43, insists on living at his family home—in a Gaza slum, where the lanes are crisscrossed with Hamas' Islamic green flags and clotheslines of wet laundry. There are no gunmen outside Haniya's simple, whitewashed house.

The world may be anxious to see how Israel and Hamas deal with each other. But Palestinians are more worried about another showdown: between Hamas and Fatah, the organization founded by Yasser Arafat, whose members do not want to relinquish control of the Palestinian government to the upstarts. Both Palestinian officials and Israeli security experts say that a clash between the two forces is inevitable and could swiftly turn violent. The feud runs deep. Fatah members are secular, while Hamas' leadership is guided by the Koran. Palestinians complain that many of Arafat's old commanders are little better than gangsters, men who made fortunes when they arrived from exile in Tunis in 1994 by siphoning off aid, creating monopolies, grabbing property, and running protection rackets. Hamas militants, by contrast, have a reputation for discipline and honesty and have vowed to hunt down corrupt Fatah officials. Nor does it help that in 1996, as Arafat tried to wipe out opposition to him, dozens of Islamic militants were jailed, tortured and murdered by his supporters. "Fatah guys were worse than the Israelis," recalled a member of a third militant group, Islamic Jihad. "The Israelis would stop beating us to let us pray. Fatah never stopped."

Hamas won't officially take over the Palestinian government for several weeks. But already Fatah is causing trouble. The Israeli Defense Forces concede that Hamas militants have stuck to their yearlong cease-fire, but since the election Fatah has intensified its attacks on Israeli targets. Fatah appears to be aiming to bring Israeli wrath on Hamas, hence hastening the downfall of Haniya's government. So far, Israel has been careful to distinguish who is shooting before it fires back. Since the election, no Hamas targets have been attacked, but last week an Israeli missile killed two Islamic Jihad militants riding in an ice cream truck in Gaza, along with three bystanders, including a child and a teenager. Says Col. Yohanan Tzoreff, a senior researcher at the Institute for Counter Terrorism near Tel Aviv, "If Fatah continues its terrorist attacks against us, we know that it isn't trying to destroy Israel but to destroy the Hamas regime."

The old Palestinian guard is disruptive in other ways, too. Hamas has made a plea for national unity, but top Fatah members involved in the negotiations say that their leaders will probably refuse to join Haniya's cabinet. And Fatah is loath to give up cushy jobs. Aziz Dweik, the new Hamas speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, tried to dismiss Ibrahim Khraisheh from his position as the Council's secretary-general. According to witnesses, 20 gunmen ringed the Council building and demanded that Hamas give Fatah's Khraisheh back his post, despite his defeat in the elections. Eventually the gunmen backed off. In its last days in power, Fatah placed dozens more militiamen in key security jobs. It isn't just loss of power that irks. According to Hamas officials involved with the investigations, the Islamic group has been compiling fat files on corrupt Fatah officials, intending to prosecute them soon. One Hamas web site shows a document detailing the sale to a Fatah official of an armor-plated BMW for $250,000.

The brewing conflict with Fatah will test Haniya—who, as it happens, drives an ancient Toyota. His elevation has been courtesy of Israel's success in killing or arresting earlier Hamas leaders. Friends and Hamas colleagues say Haniya is soft-spoken and a good listener. He is described as a man with few enemies, which makes him a rarity in the politics of the Middle East. Haniya and Abbas are said to like each other. But as Zai Abu Amar, a legislator with ties to Hamas, says: "This is Haniya's first job in politics—and it's as Prime Minister." Within Hamas, say Israeli intelligence sources, Haniya—a close aide to Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas who was killed by an Israeli air strike in 2004—is considered a moderate, and is not known to have participated directly in any attacks on Israel. He does not act alone. Some members of Hamas' leadership are in Damascus, a safe haven from Israeli strikes, which allows them freedom of movement to meet with foreign envoys. And Haniya has to listen to scores of senior Hamas militants—including 11 freshly elected members of the Palestinian parliament—who are among the 1,800 held in Israel's high-security Ketziot prison in the Negev desert, and who communicate with the outside world through smuggled cell phones and notes carried out by lawyers and relatives. According to Israeli sources in the prison administration, the jailed Hamas chiefs have told Haniya they want revenge for the purges that senior Fatah officials carried out in 1996. Both Palestinian and Israeli sources say that Hamas leaders are trying to persuade Islamic Jihad to halt terrorist attacks against Israel, at least for the time being. To an extent, this seems to have worked; Islamic Jihad has limited its recent actions against Israel to a few rocket attacks. But Palestinian sources say that Islamic Jihad is wary of joining Hamas in government, uncertain how Hamas will handle Israel. "They are willing to support Hamas—but from the outside," says one Palestinian familiar with the talks.

Hamas wants to clean the Palestinian house before talking to Israel, whose security officials say they expect it will take Haniya and his team at least a year to clear away Fatah's corruption. But Hamas may not have much respite; on March 28, Israel holds an election. The Kadima party of acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, leading in the polls, plans to draw permanent borders between Israel and the Palestinian territories, whether Hamas is willing to negotiate or not. That would test Haniya like nothing else. And he must know that if his militants take up the gun again, no amount of security outside his Gaza home would protect him from Israel's vengeance.