Under siege and facing an increasingly restive population chafing at food and fuel shortages caused by an Israeli blockade, Hamas pulled off a brilliant propaganda move this week when it brought down the hated wall on the Egyptian border.

“Hamas should all move to Madison Avenue and ply their trade there,” said Arieh Mekel, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, grudgingly comparing the Islamists to the cream of New York’s PR industry. Other Israeli officials said that with the toppling of the wall Gaza had become Cairo’s headache. The move would finally complete Israel’s disengagement from what it has branded a “hostile entity”.

Egypt was struggling to reseal the border yesterday, turning water cannon on thousands of Palestinians crossing the frontier to buy supplies. When they fired in the air at stone-throwing youths, they got a taste of Gazan fury — armed Hamas fighters rushed in and the police retreated. To reinforce the point that they were in charge, Hamas brought in a bulldozer and ploughed another hole in the broken wall. “Until we have normal crossings we’ll not allow them to close the passages,” said one of the militants.

Hamas had arrived at this point through a dramatic sequence of events — many of which the Israelis, and even some Gazans, suspect were engineered by Hamas itself. The Islamists had stepped up the barrage of Qassam rockets on the Israeli town of Sderot after an Israeli raid that killed 20 Palestinians. In response Israel cut off supplies to Gaza through its border crossings, with vast areas plunged into darkness when it switched off electricity.

Israel denounced the blackout as a propaganda ploy, pointing out that 70 per cent of Gaza’s electricity came via cables not affected by the cuts.

Hamas was quick to capitalise, with candlelit processions of women and children on the blacked-out streets airing instantly on the evening news on Arab networks and even Israel’s two main channels. Mr Mekel said that he suspected some of the footage was pre-recorded and accused Hamas members of turning off the power themselves.

Even some Gazans suspected that the Islamist government— which took Gaza by force last summer in a pitched battle with its more moderate West Bank rival Fatah — could have had a hand in turning off the lights. “It’s possible. Everything is possible,” said Maamon Khozendar, chairman of a large Gaza petrol company and a senior member of the union that ships fuel to the power station. “Hamas all the time are playing a game. They want to break the closure. Sometimes you must make severe surgical operations,” he said.

Mr Khozendar, an independent who served five years in an Israeli jail in the 1970s as a young Fatah leader, acknowledged that the stakes were high for Hamas, politically isolated and trapped in a tiny plot of land with 1.5 million mouths to feed. “Hamas have their back to the wall.”

Smashing down the wall on Wednesday was a stunning reversal of the siege and hundreds of thousands of Gazans hailed the militants as heroes. As Hamas enjoyed its revitalised role in the political arena, some Israeli officials were looking at potential long-term benefits.

“This is a blessing in disguise for Israel,” said one, who asked not to be named. “If Egypt leaves it like this, which I doubt, this is the dream of the Israeli Right,” — to hand responsibility of Gaza to Egypt and concentrate all its attention on reaching a deal with a weakened Fatah in the West Bank. That could allow Israeli settlement blocks to stay where they are and create a small Palestinian state out of a divided Palestinian people whose most prized possession had always been their unity.

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