[Ha'aretz] Avi Issacharoff - On Tuesday morning in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, the armed men were noticeably absent from the alleyways. On almost every visit to the town over the past months, you would see them roving about in groups: Hamas people, members of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) and others. It's not clear what made them scarce all of a sudden in this town: Perhaps it was the massive IDF strike against the armed militants, or maybe it was shame over their part in the military escalation that sent them into hiding from the furious residents. Some in Beit Hanoun were saying that after the shelling last week and the killing of civilians, some prominent local families had expressly threatened members of the rocket cells. In one instance, they say, an armed man identified with Fatah put a gun to the head of a Hamas activist who was busy laying cables to launch a Kassam rocket. The would-be launcher ran away. On Wednesday morning, members of the military wing of Hamas returned to Beit Hanoun, launched a volley of rockets toward Sderot, and then fled. Ismail Radwan, the Hamas spokesman in Gaza, is not particularly extreme in Hamas. He is ready to talk with Israeli journalists - something that his predecessors (Sami Abu Zohri and Mushir al-Masri) were unwilling to do. "Let's be realistic," I urge. "You know you won't be able to wipe out Israel. So, leaving aside your ideological slogans, what is your realistic solution?" Radwan answers, "The only solution is that we return to our homes within the 1948 territory." Even the people close to Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the "pragmatic" camp in Hamas, are only willing to talk about a cease-fire with Israel, but not about peace, since they too have absolute faith that within a few years, Israel will cease to exist. Maher Maqdad, a Fatah spokesman in Gaza, said, "After Beit Hanoun, people were asking themselves: Where is this mighty 'resistance' of Hamas that is trampled by the Israeli army within minutes?"
2006-11-17 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive