Relations between the Palestinian group Hamas, which is based in the Syrian capital, Damascus, and the Syrian authorities have been strained in recent weeks, mostly as a result of the antigovernment uprising there, with reports growing that Hamas is looking for another home.
Al Hayat, the London-based pan-Arab newspaper, reported Saturday that Hamas’s political wing was decamping to Doha, the capital of Qatar, but Hamas officials in Syria and beyond it denied it. Similar reports circulated on Monday and denials were again issued.
But Hamas officials acknowledged in a series of interviews that relations with Syrian officials have been tense.
“The Syrian government said to us, ‘Whoever is not with us is against us,’ ” said a senior Hamas official at a Palestinian camp near Damascus. “It wants us to express clearly our position over what is going on in Syria. It wants us to be against the Syrian demonstrations. We told them we are neutral. We said to them we are living in the country as visitors and we have no right to comment or interfere in the country’s problems.”
Since March, antigovernment protests inspired by similar events across the Arab world have broken out across Syria, with about 500 demonstrators killed by security forces.
Salah Bardawil, a Hamas official in Gaza, said Hamas “cannot support a party against another party in an Arab country,” adding, “The Syrian leadership and other leaderships should understand Hamas’s strategic principle not to intervene in the internal affairs of the states.”
Hamas considers itself a populist movement, and although it owes a great deal to the government of President Bashar al-Assad, it does not wish to be associated with its current policies of suppression.
Asked about the report that Hamas would move to Qatar, Abu Izz, the Damascus bureau manager for Hamas’s leader, Khaled Meshal, said by telephone that it was false.
“There is nothing to this report in Al Hayat that we are going to Qatar,” he said. “It is absolutely not true.”
But Amr al-Azm, a Syrian historian at Shawnee State University in Ohio, who is in frequent touch with people in Damascus, said that the Hamas leadership was definitely examining its options, looking at other countries in which it might settle.
He said that in addition to wanting Hamas to condemn the popular uprising, the Syrian government was angry that it had not been consulted about the reconciliation pact Hamas agreed to sign with its rival, the Palestinian faction Fatah, in Cairo on Wednesday. But he added that, ultimately, the Syrian government would want to keep Hamas in Damascus, because its presence there was a major point of negotiation in the peace process.
“If Hamas moves out, then Syria loses that card,” Mr. Azm said. “The Assad regime might get annoyed with Hamas, but ultimately Hamas gives them a kind of legitimacy because it lets them say that they’re holding up the banner of resistance.”
The two Palestinian movements have traditionally drawn support from opposing international camps — Hamas from Syria and Iran, Fatah from the United States and Europe. Hamas is hoping to step up its relations with Egypt to the point of opening some kind of bureau in Cairo.
A Hamas leader in Syria, Abu Almajad, said that Qatar would be happy to see Mr. Meshal move there because that would decrease the influence of Iran on Hamas. “That will bring Hamas back to the Arab side away from Iran,” he said.
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