Word: fatah
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...What's behind the tension? Hamas accuses Abbas's cronies of trying to undermine the democratically elected Hamas. One senior Hamas official told TIME that Fatah chiefs are boasting to the Bush Administration and Arab leaders that if the international boycott on funds and aid continues, the Hamas government will fall within three months. And the president's men, so the plot goes, will again grab power. One chain-smoking Hamas commander, hiding in a safehouse from Israeli hunters, says that his outfit had no gripe against Abbas, only against those "corrupted leaders of Fatah who have turned into agents...
...infighting between Hamas and Fatah was made worse by a peace plan crafted, with the best of intentions, by Palestinian prisoners inside Israeli jails. In essence, the prisoners recommend that the Palestinians offer peace to Israel if it withdraws from all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, occupied since the 1967 war. This proposal, according to one Israeli penitentiary official, began as a whispered idea in the prison showers and as notes slipped between inmates during jail yard exercises. The creators of the plan are all convicted terrorists, but their years spent in Israeli custody, and the yawning stretch...
...waste of money. If Hamas and Abbas can indeed now come to an agreement on the prisoners' proposal, that would end the need for a referendum - and the dispute over it. Until then, however, the political showdown is fanning the anger on the streets between Hamas and Fatah gunmen...
...Daskal, former head of the anti-terror wing in Military Intelligence, "The friction can only get worse. Neither side is willing to compromise." Martin Indyk, former Assistant Secretary of State and now director of the Brookings's Saban Center for Middle East policy, points out that while Hamas and Fatah were feuding for years, "They've always stepped back from civil war. But at the moment they're breaking that taboo on a daily basis...
...that they are not plagued by the ethnic and religious hatreds that are imploding Iraq. They stop shooting long enough to attend each other's marriages, and it's not uncommon for families to have men belonging to rival militias. In one Gaza family, three brothers belong to Fatah, one to Hamas and another to the extremist Islamic Jihad. Says one brother Shahaaf, from Abbas's presidential guard. "This civil war stuff is an exaggeration. Even as a Fatah member, I know that there are corrupt leaders in our party who must be removed. That...