Hamas’s senior political leader, Abdel Aziz Rantissi, yesterday punctured any US hopes of ending a spiral of tit-for-tat attacks in which 60 Israelis and Palestinians have lost their lives, declaring that Hamas would redouble its war on Israel.
‘The word ceasefire is not in our dictionary,’ said Rantissi, the target of last week’s attempted assassination by Israeli helicopters. ‘Resistance will continue until we uproot [the Israelis] from our homeland.’
Rantissi’s comments come at the end of a week in which Hamas broke off ceasefire negotiations with Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and in which senior US officials rushed to Israel to save the peace process.
They come, too, at the end of a week in which civilians on both sides have borne the brunt of the fatalities.
On Friday, it was the turn of Mohammad Matter to be mourned, gunmen firing a volley of shots over his funeral procession.
Matter (35) a post-graduate student, was driving home from university on Thursday when an Israeli rocket hit the car in front of him, killing a member of Hamas, his wife and two children, Matter and three bystanders.
They were just eight of 22 people killed in Gaza City by five Israeli missile strikes in 72 hours last week. Eight were members of Hamas: 12 were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Since Tuesday’s attempted assassination of Rantissi, Washington’s ‘road map’ to peace suddenly seems irrelevant. The upsurge of violence between Israel and Hamas coincided with the arrival of the first US monitors, a team of 10 to 15 CIA and State Department officials, headed by John Wolf, an Assistant Secretary of State.
Under the plan, Israel was to withdraw from territory it had reoccupied over the past 32 months, while the Palestinians were to dismantle militias, including Hamas.
Now Wolf’s mission is to rescue a peace process that is threatening to drown in the blood of both sides.
‘Without sounding too alarmist,’ one US diplomat said, ‘the whole road map initiative is looking imperilled. There’s a need for some very high-level intervention to get things back on track.’
Yet the peace raced in two separate directions from the start. As senior Palestinian Authority officials sat down with their Israeli counterparts to discuss what conditions might be necessary for an Israeli army withdrawal from parts of the Gaza Strip, Hamas was accelerating away from hopes of peace.
The conflict that pitches Israel against Hamas is also threatening to set Hamas against the Palestinian Authority, whose Prime Minister Abbas is regarded with suspicion by Hamas.
The conflict has been a long time coming. While the West Bank intifada was largely associated with offshoots of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, Gaza — religiously conservative and despised by West Bankers — is Hamas.
Since Israel’s invasion of the West Bank last year, Hamas’s Gaza fighters and suicide bombers have been in the forefront of the intifada, despite Israel’s intelligence officials’ blithe assurance three years ago that 98% of Hamas members were dead or in custody. Since then, Hamas has been the most efficient of the Palestinian factions, remarkable in its confidence inside its Gaza power base.
On Friday, Ismail Abu Shenab, a Hamas leader with a similar stature to Rantissi, emerged from his mosque five minutes after the body of Matter had been borne away.
‘We are used to this life, it has never been easy. It is a central characteristic of the Israeli occupation,’ he said. He admit ted that Hamas had been close to agreeing to a ceasefire.
‘We were very close until we discovered that the ceasefire would mean an abandoning of the intifada for no gain. We had stopped firing rockets at Israel. We gave them the opportunity, but they did not make use of it. It means they are not serious about peace.’
If Israel’s last campaign against Hamas was fought against the background of an unsettled peace, this time it is being fought against the background of an intifada that has radicalised Palestinian society, and where the suicide bombers of Hamas have been raised to the status of heroes.
It is a long way from the movement’s roots, founded and legally registered in Israel in 1978 by its spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, as an Islamic charitable association that had grown out of the Muslim Brotherhood.
A decade later it would set out its credo — a challenge to Israel’s occupation and also to Arafat’s PLO — as Hamas extended its influence through the refugee camps of Gaza by a combination of charititable work, Islamic teaching and the development of its underground military wing — and the suicide bombers.
Not far from where they buried Matter last week they were burying Tito Massoud, a Hamas activist killed by Israeli rockets. ‘There is a possibility of a ceasefire if the Israelis withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank, dismantle the settlements, release our prisoners and stop the assassinations,’ said his brother, Khaled Massoud (27).
Even if the Israelis agreed to some of these demands, Massoud said Palestinians should fight on. This is the great conundrum of Hamas — its violence is matched both by the pragmatism of its leadership and its discipline.
‘The thing about Hamas,’ said one diplomatic source, ‘is that it is still far more disciplined and organised than the Tanzim, Palestinian Islamic Jihad or the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.’ When Hamas says it is stepping up its operations, the prospects for peace are dim indeed. – Guardian Unlimited Â