JERUSALEM — The events of the past few days in and around Gaza — mortar and grenade battles, negotiations drawing in Israel and Egypt, and the bizarre denouement in which Israel both saved and interrogated scores of Palestinian fighters — offer a glimpse of the byzantine nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
While broadly presented to the world as a fight between the two main Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, the developments in fact mirror a more complex set of relationships and shifting alliances that help explain why this conflict remains so difficult to resolve.
Any fight here has its origins in earlier violence, so where to begin is problematic. Nonetheless, these particular events began at dawn on Saturday when Hamas forces, which have ruled Gaza for the past year, surrounded the home of the sprawling, well-armed and once powerful Hilles clan, whose chief had been associated with Fatah.
In part, Hamas was looking for the perpetrators of a bombing a week earlier that killed five of its men and a girl, but more broadly it was taking the next step in the consolidation of its power and rule over 1.5 million Palestinians in the coastal Gaza Strip.
Fighting raged all Saturday, and 11 people were killed: two Hamas fighters, eight members of the clan and a passer-by. By dusk, scores of clan members were running to the Israeli border fence demanding to be let in to avoid death.
Urged by Fatah leaders in the West Bank to comply, Israel, which is negotiating peace with Fatah and trying to isolate Hamas, let them in. Some 181 people were allowed to cross into Israel, with 22 taken to hospitals and treated and the rest put up overnight on a military base. It was said they would soon be transferred to safety among their associates in the West Bank.
On Sunday, Fatah leaders in the West Bank made clear they had no desire to welcome those 181 people. The reasons offered were vague — Gaza should not be stripped of all Fatah followers, and more would doubtless follow if they were let in — and promises were given through Egypt that the men would not be harmed if they returned home.
In truth, the relationship between the Fatah leadership in the West Bank and the Hilles clan was poor. President Mahmoud Abbas, the head of Fatah, who is allied with other former Fatah leaders in Gaza, was angry that the Hilles clan stood on the sideline when street fighting broke out between Hamas and Fatah in Gaza in June 2007. Some Hilles members are with Hamas. And generally the clan cares about itself more than about either party. Send them back, Mr. Abbas told the Israelis.
So Israel sent about three dozen men back and said the others were on their way. As soon as the men stepped into Gaza, Hamas arrested them. Since human rights groups have recently reported on torture in Gaza, alarms were raised. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel sent an urgent appeal to the Supreme Court demanding that Israel stop returning the men to Gaza.
On Monday morning, the Israeli military announced that it would not send them all to Gaza and that it had persuaded Mr. Abbas to allow many of them into the West Bank. So the civil rights group backed off, replaced by two right-wing activists who petitioned the court to stop the transfer of dangerous men across Israel. By day’s end, the army had moved 88 of the men on military buses to Jericho. Several dozen others were sent to Gaza, while 16 were still in the hospital.
And the rest? Israeli security forces were interrogating them because Israeli intelligence considered them terrorists who had possibly shot Israeli soldiers, launched rockets at Israeli towns or engaged in other anti-Israel violence.
So for now, the Hilles clan has been neutralized, Hamas has increased its power, Fatah leaders are seen as two-timing and indecisive, and Israel helped save the lives of some of its enemies. The streets of Gaza were deserted Monday night as Hamas police officers raided apartment buildings where Fatah loyalists lived.
Still, each side had its own interpretation of the meaning of it all. Israel felt it was not getting the credit it deserved. As Avi Benayahu, an army spokesman, said on Army Radio, “There is no other army in the world that would take such a humanitarian approach to help Palestinians, some armed, being chased and fired at by Hamas.” He added that “Israel has not received any praises for its actions. Yet this is the kind of army we have.”
Sufian Abu Zaida, a Fatah lawmaker, told Army Radio he had a slightly different interpretation of what the Hilles drama meant from a Palestinian perspective.
“When a person is faced with the choice of being killed by his own people or arrested by his enemy, he will prefer to be arrested by his enemy,” he said. “And this gives you a pretty good picture of how bad and cruel the situation is in Gaza.”
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