RAMALLAH: After nearly two weeks of showing a united front in the face of Israel’s war in Gaza, some Palestinians are starting to slam Hamas for dragging its feet on a truce as the death toll mounts.
With Hamas maintaining a tight grip on the Gaza Strip, most of the critical voices are coming from the rival Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, whose forces the Islamists routed from the coastal enclave in June 2007.
Those close to the Fatah party of moderate president Mahmoud Abbas accuse Hamas of trying to extract political gains from the Gaza offensive all the while turning a blind eye on the rising numbers of civilian dead.
“When we hear the conditions posed by certain Hamas leaders in exile, you get an impression that our tanks were carrying out incursions in the streets of Tel Aviv, when in fact it’s their tanks that are in the heart of our homeland,” wrote last week Hafez Barghuthi, the editor in chief of Al Hayat Al Jadida, the newspaper of the PA.
For Barghuti and others, Hamas is delaying accepting an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire deal in order to get their people stationed at the Rafah border terminal — Gaza’s sole crossing that bypasses Israel.
Such a move would accord indirect recognition to Hamas, a group boycotted by most of the West as a terror outfit.
“Hamas’s demands in this war boil down to the Rafah terminal,” Barghuti wrote in a separate article.
“But the deal to open the terminal could have been agreed over a cup of coffee in Cairo instead of a war that has caused an unprecedented catastrophe in the Gaza Strip,” he wrote.
Ashraf Al Ajrami, minister for prisoner affairs, is even
more emphatic.
“Hamas and Israel have a common interest — keeping a catastrophic situation in Gaza and preventing the creation of an independent Palestinian state.”
Azzam Al Ahmad, the head of Fatah’s parliamentary faction, said he put aside differences with Hamas when he called on one of its exiled leaders, Mussa Abu Marzuk, to accept the Egyptian truce plan.
“But he refused,” he said.
“I think that with its intransigent position, Hamas wants that its authority be recognised as a fait accompli in Gaza,” he says. “They pay little heed to the number of victims who fall each day.”
Ahmad claims that Hamas is holding on to its intransigent positions “with foreign instigation,” a reference to the Islamists’ backers in Syria and Iran.
Other observers mock the Islamists’ boasts at the start of the war, when Hamas vowed to turn Gaza into a “graveyard” for Israeli soldiers.
“With each passing day, Hamas is losing its credibility as the victory that it has promised is nowhere to be found, while more than 5,000 people have been wounded and killed and the destruction caused are in the billions of dollars,” says Samih Shabib, a political columnist close to Fatah.
Despite the political criticism, the offensive on Gaza has not dampened the popularity of Hamas in the West Bank and the Arab world, says Ghassan Al Khatib, the director of the Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre (JMCC).
“Gaza and its population are victims of a real massacre and the street generally sympathises with the party that aligns itself with the resistance, like Hamas is doing by continuing to fire rockets,” he says.
But it is difficult to judge the level of popularity that Hamas, which has run Gaza with an iron fist, has inside the territory, where the Israeli offensive has killed more than 1,100 people, including 355 children, he says.
