Word: gaza
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...divided and subdivided into endless compartmentalized cells responsible for discrete tasks: recruitment, planning, weapons development, operations, security. Apart from a few top guns like Ishtawi, who was an overall operations commander and liaison to West Bank Hamas groups, cell members know nothing about units outside their own. In Gaza, when a cell is decapitated, fresh leaders are ready to spring into place. "Even if Sheik Yassin got killed," a Hamas activist told me last month, "Hamas is a big organization now and even he can be replaced. When a leader is killed, it makes us all tougher and ready...
...been even more dramatic. Last September, al-Zahar's house was flattened by an Israeli bomb that wounded him and tore his son to pieces. Now he, Rantisi and Haniya, another of the political brain trust, live in hiding. They have left home to go into safe houses in Gaza's warren of refugee camps where Hamas supporters are eager to shelter them. The leadership no longer travels in cars but walks, sticking to back alleys instead of main arteries. The bosses do not answer incoming calls; they use fresh cell phones with batteries and SIM cards that...
...dirty work of Hamas is devised and executed by killers like the man I knew initially as Mohammed. When I met him the first time, on a downtown Gaza City street, the meeting had been arranged to look like a casual encounter as we walked amid the regular Hamas rally after Friday noon prayers. He was worried I might be a spotter for Israeli military hit teams who employ informants, sometimes unwittingly, to lure targets into range. But he felt comfortably anonymous among the noisy, armed Hamas partisans...
...amateurish, he conceded. When darkness fell, his little group would don camouflage outfits and black face masks, strap on AK-47s with three or four magazines apiece, grab a few hand grenades or rockets and head for the fringes of one of the 20 Israeli settlements laced into the Gaza Strip. Sometimes they would hit something, often not. "We'd try to shoot settlers or the soldiers guarding the houses. Or we'd fire Qassams at them," he said, referring to the crude short-range rocket called the Qassam II that Hamas began making...
Most are chosen first of all for their unswerving devotion to Hamas ideology. At a Gaza funeral last month, I encountered Salama Hamad. That is his real name, and he allowed me to use it since the Israelis already know all about him. He is a big, hulking man with supersize hands and graying hair cropped to the skull. At 32, he has been a member of Hamas for 15 years, a militant in al-Qassam for 12 and a fugitive the entire time. He has five children he sees "from time to time...