Hamas scrambles to limit Gaza damage

By Alan Johnston
BBC News, Gaza

The mood of celebration in Gaza has been broken

Just a week ago, the Palestinian militant group, Hamas, was still revelling in some of the best days it had ever known, celebrating Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

But a week is a long time in Gaza. Now, Hamas finds itself facing criticisms and making concessions. Its latest clash with Israel has gone badly, and it is trying to limit the damage.

For Hamas, this looked set to be a glorious autumn.

Its armed men had paraded in the rubble of what used to be the main Jewish settlement in Gaza. Hamas banners flew from its abandoned synagogue.

Hamas was claiming that its attacks had forced Israel into a humiliating retreat, and that Gaza was just the start.

Concession

Things suddenly went badly wrong in a moment of bloodshed on Friday night.

An explosion ripped through one of the group's victory rallies, killing 16 people.

Hamas said the Israeli air force had struck at the crowd. In retaliation, it launched a barrage of crudely-made rockets at the Israeli town of Sderot, injuring several people.

Israel was swift to retaliate with military action

Israel denied that it had attacked the rally, and the Palestinian Authority agreed.

It said there was no air strike. It said the blast was an accident - that Hamas had mishandled rockets on display at the rally.

Palestinians were divided as to whether Hamas had had any right to attack Israel.

But the deed had been done, and the fight was on.

There were Israeli helicopters and spy planes and fighter jets in the sky over Gaza again.

So far, there have been at least 15 raids on what Israel says were militant targets, and Israeli troops have massed on Gaza's perimeter.

Within 48 hours of the start of the campaign, Hamas made a major concession - it announced a halt to all its attacks from Gaza.

Public anger

Hamas normally adopts the most hostile possible tone towards Israel. It talks not only of confronting the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but also of being determined - one day - to march on to Jaffa and Tel Aviv.

The uncharacteristic, swift effort to defuse the current crisis was a clear sign of how badly Hamas felt it was going.

It had come at a time when Palestinians were still enjoying greater freedoms following Israel's withdrawal from Gaza. The sudden return to days of fear and violence did not play well.

People were starting to think about getting back to a normal life Salah Abdel Shafi Analyst

"People were starting to think about getting back to a normal life, about seeing jobs and income being generated," said analyst Salah Abdel Shafi.

"I think Hamas sensed that the public mood was really against escalation. I think Hamas realised that it would harm its popularity at this stage."

Any propaganda advantage that Hamas had gained from Israel's withdrawal from Gaza might be squandered if its actions were to draw the army back into the territory almost immediately.

And Hamas cannot afford to ignore public opinion.

A major part of its strategy is to play the democratic political game. Hamas wants to convert its considerable support on the street into real parliamentary power.

It plans to compete in the crucially important general election in just four months. But Israel is determined to obstruct those ambitions, and the current tensions may have made it easier to do that.

Election strategy

Over the past three days, Israel has arrested about 200 Hamas leaders, electoral candidates and party activists in the West Bank.

Israeli military officials say this is purely a security measure, and they refer to the recent kidnap and killing of an Israeli settler in the West Bank.

But Hamas says the arrests are an effort to sabotage its chances in Thursday's West Bank local elections.

And there are some signs that Hamas's recent tactics have failed to impress the wider Arab world - a constituency that matters to the movement.

"The bitter truth is that armed parades and failed rockets are really a weapon in Israel's hands," wrote a commentator in the Saudi daily, Asharq al-Awsat.

And one writer in a Jordanian paper was also critical.

"Hamas is placing obstacles in the way of its own participation in the political process," he said.

Hamas has clearly decided that it has nothing to gain by pushing this crisis further. But it is Israel that will decide when it comes to an end. Within hours of Hamas's announcement that it was halting its attacks, the Israeli air force had struck again.

And so if Hamas is to stick by its pledge to rein itself in, it will have to sit and absorb punishment until Israel calls off its offensive.

It is not a comfortable position for a movement that portrays itself as the iron fist of the Palestinian resistance.