ISMAIL HANIYA climbs from his prime ministerial limousine into the pulpit near his home in a Gaza refugee camp, to deliver a sermon on the Islamic virtues of patience, steadfastness and charity.
After the mosque clears, children race home to watch the latest satellite television sensation - an hour-long, hero-worshipping documentary on Mohammed Deif, the reclusive, masked and Kalashnikov-wielding leader of Hamas’s military wing who lauds the continued fight against Israel.
Two hundred miles north, in a narrow alleyway, the steel-barred gate of Hamas’s Beirut office is guarded by an armed Hezbollah fighter dressed in black.
This is Lebanon, one of Hamas’s key external fundraising bases and where its sentinels - the Shia bombers-turned-politicians Hezbollah - may be the closest Middle East parallel to its own evolution.
Hamas - the Islamic Resistance Movement - shook the Middle East when it won the Palestinian elections in January, to the chagrin of Western governments and autocratic Arab regimes nervous about its galvanising effect on their own Islamist opposition.
To Israel, Hamas is an unholy trinity, three faces of one terrorist group that let its mask slip when its armed wing (the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades) took part in Corporal Shalit’s capture, and began firing long-range rockets into Ashkelon, striking further than before into Israel.
To Hamas’s supporters its military, political and exiled leaderships are three key pillars - the fourth being prisoners in Israeli jails - of a cohesive, well-disciplined organisation whose leaders have evolved in two decades from fledging militants to government ministers, with aspirations to take over the leadership of all Palestinians at home and abroad.
But as Hamas’s election to government forces it to expand in scope and ambition, the key question is who remains in control. Is it Khaled Mashaal in Damascus, or Mr Haniya’s Cabinet in Gaza and the West Bank?
Certainly Hamas, like Hezbollah, has struggled to balance its stark ideological goals of destroying Israel with the pragmatic realities of a government representing all Palestinians, not just those who voted for it.
Hamas insiders concede that they never expected to win the election and were planning for two or three years in opposition to make the difficult transition from what they term the ‘liberation’ era to a ‘constitutional’ era.
“Hamas is trying to mix between political activities and resistance,” says Mustafa Sawaf, a Gaza political analyst.
“The political leadership sets the general framework and the military wing is expert in their job. They decide when, where and how.”
This twin-track policy that its supporters most admire is the very thing that Israel and the West most condemn.
Some within Hamas argue that suicide bombings are counter-productive in the court of Western public opinion.
Others cite the popular Palestinian view that talks alone will not achieve their ends, and that only the gun will drive out Israel.
Certainly hardliners - and many on the Palestinian street - were thrilled by the tunnel raid.
They argue that the Hamas-led Government was not being allowed to govern so it might as well return to fighting.
But the key question is how much Mr Haniya, the Interior Minister, Said Siyam, and Mahmoud Zahar, the Foreign Minister, knew about the attack in advance.
Mr Haniya’s government insists that it did not know, and Hamas’s opaque internal structure - it is run by an ultra-secretive ‘shura’ drawn from senior leaders in Gaza, the West Bank and exiles - obscures the decision-making process.
Israel alleges that Mr Mashaal organises military operations from Damascus, with support from Syria and Iran.
“I think the outside leadership directed the Kerem Shalom operation to weaken this new emerging focal point. I think it’s common knowledge that Haniya was not involved, though it seems Mahmoud Zahar was involved right from the beginning,” an Israeli government analyst told The Times.
“The outside leadership was quite afraid of the new emerging focal point inside (the Palestinian Territories). The Hamas leadership inside was tending to get closer to Mahmoud Abbas. I suspect the outside leadership was afraid the Hamas government would leave the main road of Hamas and have its own independent policy.”
Internal Palestinian opponents have also seized the chance to undermine the Hamas-led Government.
“The Hamas political leadership outside are saying the decision is in the hands of its military wing inside Gaza, while the military wing is saying the decision is in the hands of the political leadership outside,” said Walid Awad, President Abbas’s foreign spokesman.
“Ismail Haniya ... appears not to have any say in what is going on in this regard.”
Mr Mashaal, a 50-year-old former physics professor, had gone to ground after Israeli threats to kill him. He survived one Israeli assassination attempt in 1997, when Mossad agents sprayed him with poison.
Based in Damascus since 2001, he is key to Hamas’s fundraising activities, helping to raise $100 million (£54 million) from Iran and Qatar in April for the new Government.
Osama Hamdan, Hamas’s chief in Lebanon, told The Times that the movement’s overseas arm deals principally with fundraising and propaganda.
“The Qassam Brigades have their own leadership and make their own decisions according to the field situation,” Mr Hamdan said at Hamas’s safe house in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
He denied splits between Gaza and Damascus, claming that it was Mr Mashaal who clinched the recent deal with President Abbas on a Palestinian prisoners’ proposal that would implicitly recognise Israel’s right to exist.
“The Israelis were betting on a Palestinian civil war between Hamas and Fatah, especially when there was a disagreement over the prisoners’ document,” Mr Hamdan said.
“But they discovered that the one who reached the final agreement between Hamas and Fatah was Khaled Mashaal.”
In February, Mr Mashaal also held a rare meeting with a delegation of retired US diplomats in Damascus.
Edward Peck, a former US ambassador to Iraq, said the Hamas supremo came across as a “moderate in many senses" willing to engage in dialogue with Washington.
“These guys were entirely rational. They are not wild-eyed shrieking whackos,” he said.
Hamas insiders concede that there are tensions between leaders and the military wing’s hardliners who want to continue attacking Israel, just as young bucks in the IRA questioned its decision to decommission weapons.
“I see the same thing sometimes,” acknowledges Sayyed Salem Abu Musameh, a Hamas veteran.
“The political wing and the military wing do sometimes have different points of view, but we believe that at the end of the day the political wing will win the decision.
“Unlike other organisations, every member of Hamas’s military wing also has education in ideology and culture as well as the gun.
“This makes things easy for us. We have just had more than 15 months of quiet and we had no big problem. We saw some saying, ‘It is a wrong decision to stop the jihad’, but at the end of the day they obeyed the decision.”
Such comments are belied by the defiant tone of Mr Deif in the al-Jazeera television documentary, where he appears with masked fighters preparing explosives, manufacturing rockets and digging tunnels.
Jailed for 13 years from 1982 to 1995, Mr Deif has long been Israel’s most wanted man, and shows little signs of mellowing.
“We will reach the core of the Israelis. We will reach them anywhere, even inside their houses. We will target them in all occupied lands,” he said.
“Israel is occupied land and we have the right to fight occupation and to free the land because it is Islamic land.”
Most analysts agree that although differences exist, Hamas’s internal discipline is strong enough to contain them.
“Hamas is a relatively disciplined movement,” the Israeli government’s analyst said.
“That doesn’t mean there aren’t tensions. These have increased in the past two years. Over whether they should go into politics, take part in the elections, over the resistance, and the prisoners’ document ... it’s difficult to say how hot this is. But you can’t talk of Hamas as a divided movement.”
But Hamas’s greater long-term problem is how it can ever be accepted, not only by a mistrustful Israel and the West, but by secular Palestinians.
“This is part of the dilemma for them in government. They have to take the burden of the nation, not just pursue their Islamist social agenda,” said Beverley Milton-Edwards, an academic at Queens University Belfast and author of Islamic Politics in Palestine.
“They are trying to take over the whole of the national movement, including the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and make it Islamist. This does not reflect what the vote in the polls was about. That vote was about change and reform in the national interest.
“And that’s why they are still very much a movement, and not a government and not a political party.”
- Additional reporting by Ian MacKinnon
