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In West Bank Shadows, Repressed Hamas Breathes On
(Reuters) Noah Browning and Ali Sawafta - Mohammed Ghannam, 44, who delivered the call to prayer in Dura's local mosque, said plainclothes security forces from the Palestinian Authority (PA) detained him last month for belonging to the Islamist movement Hamas and beat him mute. "They hit my head again and again against a concrete wall," he wrote on a notepad. The Western-backed PA has pursued surveillance, firings, arrests and torture to bar its Islamist militant rivals in Hamas from public life in the West Bank. The London-based Arab Organization for Human Rights surveyed 300 people jailed by the PA in political and security cases in the first half of 2012. Nearly a fifth said they had faced "cruel torture" during the period. Almost all said they had been tortured during previous jailings. Hamas is similarly accused by Fatah and rights groups of widespread torture and political repression in Gaza. In one small town, a former officer of the PA's preventative security forces explained how his agency keeps a lid on Hamas by paying a monthly stipend to 40 "snitches" to monitor mosques, schools, university elections and even funerals. For now, Hamas backers in the West Bank mainly keep a low profile or risk Israeli and Palestinian jails. Yet the group hopes to ride a wave of upheaval that has swept long-repressed Islamists into power throughout the region, believing they represent ideas whose time has come.