THE attack came with a barrage of mortars and a rattle of machineguns. In the
narrow alleys of Khan Younis in the south of the Gaza Strip, black-uniformed
Hamas fighters laying siege to the compound of the Al-Astel family, one of
Gaza’s infamous ruling clans, edged forward.
After a stunning victory over their secular Fatah rivals for control of Gaza
and with the horrors of the fighting still fresh in people’s minds, Hamas,
the militant Islamic organisation, was trying to disarm the clan known for
drug smuggling and support of Fatah.
The compound held. After five hours of fighting and with two people killed,
Hamas lifted its siege when a clan elder agreed to hand over their weapons.
Hamas came away with a fifth of the family’s arsenal, an official said. Abu
Mohammed, a clan member, claimed it had handed over only five rifles and a
pistol. Asked if this was the entire arsenal, he merely grinned.
The battle was the first sign of a growing tension between Hamas and Gaza’s
most powerful families, which the organisation must confront and tame if it
is to exert full control over Gaza and curb its lawlessness.
The battle was a measure, too, of the difficulties in disarming a population
which some security analysts say has as many as 400,000 weapons stashed away
- enough to arm one in every three people.
Hamas claimed to have collected most of the weapons of the routed Fatah
security forces last week. But many more are hidden in private homes, bought
by ordinary Gazan civilians to defend themselves amid the chaos. Until Hamas
clamped down, guns were openly for sale twice a week on the fringes of a
secondhand car market in Gaza City.
There was everything for sale, from Glock pistols to explosive charges,
Kalashnikovs and M16 assault rifles. Among the favour-ites were cheap,
Chinese-made pistols, often copies of Colt and other famous American brands,
going for a song. These inexpensive weapons began flooding in after the
Israeli withdrawal in 2005, when demand for them soared, fed by the rising
internecine violence that eventually overwhelmed Gaza.
They were smuggled in by traffickers who burrowed under the Egyptian border
through tunnels. The operation was centred on the border town of Rafah where
a 26ft-high concrete wall divides the town into Gaza’s and Egypt’s
territories.
Engaged in racketeering, car-thefts, smuggling, kidnapping and murder, the
five or six big clans have contributed enormously to the criminality that
had made Gaza’s political leadership so feeble and irrelevant and everyday
life so frightening and dangerous.
The big test of whether Hamas is going to cooperate with the families - or
smash them now that it is in charge - is the effort to free Alan Johnston,
the kidnapped BBC Gaza correspondent, who spent his 100th day in captivity
last week.
He is being held by a wing of the powerful Dagmoush clan, centred on northern
Gaza. Their activities are largely criminal.
Immediately they seized power, Hamas made releasing the journalist a priority
- perhaps as a conciliatory gesture to the outside world after its bloody
victory had plunged Gaza into still deeper international isolation.
Before its defeat by Hamas, Fatah, who controlled most of Gaza’s security
forces, had been threatening to destroy the Dagmoush neighbourhood with
bulldozers, but to no avail. Hamas seems determined to succeed where its
discredited predecessors failed.
“We will not allow his [Johnston’s] continued detention. We warn against not
releasing him,” said Abu Obeid, a spokesman.
The ultimatums and threats to use force have brought no result. Hamas’s
patience is now wearing thin.
“Either Hamas have lost their nerve or they have been leaned on by the
British,” said a Palestinian human rights official close to the case.
A Hamas spokesman claimed it was the latter: “The British consular officials
asked us not to use force for fear Johnston might be killed. We are still
confident he will be freed very soon.”
For the last week Hamas militiamen have been watching the Sabra area where the
Dagmoush clan lives, waiting for orders to move in. Mumtaz Dagmoush, the
clan leader behind the kidnapping, is believed to be seeking assurances that
he and his relatives will not be killed once Johnston is freed.
On Wednesday, in the midst of negotiations, there were complications when a
member of the clan, Munir Dagmoush, was shot dead by unknown gunmen in
another part of Gaza. His killing raised fears that the clan might try to
kidnap another foreigner to shore up its position.
The Dagmoush are by no means Gaza’s largest gang family, but they can mobilise
several thousand members on to the streets. Their rise to a commanding
position took many years.
“They were low down in the pecking order of the clans, the dogsbodies who
helped build some of the Israeli settlements in Gaza, and they were always
involved in smuggling and crime,” said a Palestinian official. “They got
their power by auctioning themselves off, selling themselves as guns for
hire to the rival factions, vacillating between Fatah and Hamas.”
Today the clan is very wealthy, owning prime property in Gaza City. They came
to prominence last year when they cooperated with Hamas in the kidnapping of
the Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit, who is still being held captive. They
were also believed to be responsible for the abduction of two western
reporters from Fox TV last year. The reporters were released after two weeks.
Palestinians alleged that the kidnapping of Johnston was primarily motivated
by money. The kidnap gang has demanded a £1.25m ransom and is also believed
to be seeking land in a former Israeli settlement.
The kidnap was also a way for Mumtaz Dagmoush, swinging between Fatah and
Hamas, to prove his jihadi (holy war) connections.
He is one of the key figures behind a shadowy Palestinian offshoot of the clan
called Jaish al-Is-lam (Army of Islam), which officially claims
responsibility for the abduction. The kidnap gang is demanding the release
of Al-Qaeda militants imprisoned in Britain and Jordan in return for
Johnston’s release.
“The Dagmoush wanted to claim they were more Islamist than Hamas,” said a
Palestinian close to the clan. “Whereas in the past they were allies,
Johnston was very much an attempt to prove that Hamas could not maintain
order and could not establish total control.”
This month’s fighting - which saw patients shot in their hospital beds and
buildings turned into shooting galleries - killed nearly 150 and wounded 600
and shocked Gazans with its ferocity, filling them with worries about their
place in the world and how they will survive.
Even before the Hamas victory, Gazans regarded the coastal enclave as a big,
overcrowded prison, boxed in by Israel and Egypt.
Now its borders with both countries are sealed. And the president of the
Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, who called the Hamas takeover
a “criminal coup”, has appointed a new government in the West Bank, in
effect leaving Gaza in Hamas’s control.
A lot of pressure is being placed on Hamas to seize the territory’s mountain
of illegal weapons, particularly those owned by the clans. Hamas believes
this will be a big step towards curbing criminal activities.
But a guns amnesty last week was met with apathy and had dismal results. Hamas
dispatched cars with loudspeakers into the streets and made announcements
from mosques warning defeated security officials and the population at large
to hand over their weapons. It also asked people to return looted property.
Seven collection points were set up around the city. But when the Thursday
deadline expired there was nothing more dangerous deposited than a metal
door, a window frame, a water tap and a penknife at one of the sites, the
Shafei mosque. A pickup lorry, which had been stolen from one of the
security groups, was also returned.
Jamal al-Jarah, the commander of the Hamas militia known as the Executive
Force, said the roundup had been 90% successful.
Not all Fatah fighters have given up their guns. Yesterday, Munir, 23, a
swimmer on the beach, turned out to have been attached to a Fatah security
unit and had been fighting Hamas militia close by only 10 days before.
Asked what he had done with his rifle, he gave a toothy smile. “I buried my
rifle down a hole,” he said. “I am certain that sometime I will need it to
shoot again.”
