When hundreds of Fatah gunmen paraded past his West Bank supermarket last week, Mohammad Zahi stared unbelieving at their sparkling black M16 assault rifles.
In years past, gunmen in similar military displays waved ageing Kalashnikovs, the cheaper and cruder Soviet-designed rifle common in the Palestinian territories and much of the Arab world.
”I haven’t seen M16s in those numbers before,” says Zahi (24), arms crossed matter of factly. ”In the past it was just a lot of Kalashnikovs.”
The new rifles brandished by the Fatah foot soldiers are a sign of the arms race that many allege is quietly raging between Fatah and Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The rival factions have been on a collision course ever since the hard-line Islamist Hamas movement unseated the long-ruling lions of Fatah in a January vote.
As the two parties have publicly jostled for power they have also set about stealthily arming themselves, observers, intelligence officials and party leaders allege, in preparation for a confrontation that seems to be drawing nearer with each fallen militant.
In recent days 12 people have died in the latest bout of cross-faction clashes that have simmered throughout the summer.
The latest effort to quell the tension by forming a unity government has disintegrated. Doomsday predictors, increasingly easy to come by these days, say a civil war looms.
The duelling arms build-up may be making that outcome all the more inevitable, observers worry.
”They’re buying all these guns so now they’re going to have to use them or what’s the point?” says Zahi, unwittingly paraphrasing an old war proverb that says, no army every mobilised without going to war.
Though there are few hard numbers, there is a prevailing impression on the Palestinian street that there are more guns, more rocket-propelled grenades (RPG) and more weapons in general today than there were just one year ago.
”When you see 50 cars filled with gunmen, in a protest march in Ramallah as we did last week, you conclude that there are more weapons coming in,” says Khalil Shaheen, a senior editor with the Ramallah-based al-Ayam daily.
”There are no statistics but there is a feeling that the amount of weapons circulating in the West Bank is increasing.”
Hamas began its arms drive to counter Fatah’s monopoly of the Palestinian security services. It has deployed a private army, the so-called Executive Force, in the streets of Gaza and is rumoured to be readying a similar force for the West Bank.
The Fatah party of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, meanwhile, has benefited from United States and Israeli efforts to undermine the Hamas government.
In June, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced the transfer of hundreds of American-made M16 rifles and four armoured vehicles to Abbas’s Force 17 guards. Abbas denied receiving any arms shipment.
More recently, on Thursday the New York Times reported that the US had proposed expanding Abbas’s presidential guard from 3 500 men to 6 000 as part of a $26-million plan to strengthen the moderate Palestinian leader.
In Gaza, shooting deaths, accidental and otherwise, and deaths from mishandled explosives are on the rise, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.
Locally manufactured RPGs, once a rare sight, are now as common as the ubiquitous Kalashnikov.
Hamas’s struggles with Fatah, however, are not the only factor driving the arms drive, Shaheen says. Hamas’s uncompromising stance toward Israel and its June capture of Corporal Gilad Shalit, claimed along with Palestinian factions, have brought it into direct confrontation with the Jewish state.
”After seeing Hezbollah’s success against Israel, Hamas and other factions want to repeat this experience here,” he says. ”The factions are preparing for confrontation with Israel as much as for a confrontation with each other.”
Israeli military officials have sounded similar alarm bells, telling the Israeli daily Yediot Ahranot recently that Hamas was channelling arms and money into a 7 500-man strong army consisting of rocket units, anti-tank units and sniper squads, capable of taking on the Israeli army.
Hamas responded on Sunday by claiming its forces were twice that size.
Tawfiq al-Tirawi, head of the Palestinian intelligence service, paints a dire picture of Hamas’s growing arms stores.
Since coming to power, Tirawi says, Hamas has amassed ”millions of bullets, many tonnes of explosives, thousands of RPGs and thousands of assault rifles”.
”I fear a civil war is now unavoidable,” the spy chief says.
The weapons are bought from arms dealers in the West Bank, or smuggled from Egypt into Gaza by tunnel and by sea.
For its part, Hamas says it’s natural for a resistance movement to seek out arms and says they are directed at Israel, not their Fatah rivals.
”Hamas is a resistance movement and so it is always looking for sources to arm itself,” said spokesperson Ghazi Hamad. ”This is something natural.” — AFP
