Hamas has done its homework and Gazans are ready for the Israeli tanks, observes Saleh Al-Naami The house's entrance opens onto a modest waiting room that is filled throughout the day and most of the night. Dressed in civilian clothes and military uniforms, men clutch files and patiently await permission to enter. This is the house of Said Siyam, the minister of the interior in Ismail Haniyeh's government, which is running the affairs of the Gaza Strip. Siyam runs the Interior Ministry and its security agencies from a simple office on the northern side of the first floor of his home in Gaza City's Al-Nasr neighbourhood. He is not the only minister to run his ministry's affairs from home; most of the ministers shoulder the bulk of their work burdens in private houses. This is done as a preventive measure lest the ministries and government agencies be targeted by Israeli bombing -- something that has happened more than once. "We are living under abnormal circumstances, and so we must deal with them in non-traditional ways," Siyam says. "We must adapt to all conditions, be prepared for all scenarios, and make provisions for the worst of them," he told Al-Ahram Weekly. While civil servants and security personnel presently work in their institutions and offices, this may change at any moment, particularly if Israel decides to wage a large-scale campaign against the Gaza Strip following the conclusion of the international conference in Annapolis. The Weekly has learnt that Haniyeh's government has devised a plan to evacuate civil and security headquarters and institutions. It will run them from numerous locations in a manner requiring the fewest number of individuals possible while offering the most services it can to the public during any possible attack against the Gaza Strip. Complementary to this plan, preparations and training continue for military confrontation with the Israeli army should a military campaign be waged against the Strip. Clashes that have taken place recently in the Gaza Strip between occupation soldiers and Hamas fighters indicate that Hamas is undertaking significant preparations to confront such attacks. Last Sunday's issue of Haaretz revealed the impressions of parachute corps reserve soldiers in the Israeli army who recently served in the Gaza Strip. Their impressions are revealing: Hamas is fighting like a regular army in every sense of the word. Amos Harael, the newspaper's military correspondent, reported soldiers as saying, "by any standards we faced an army, not gangs." The soldiers were impressed with the military performance of these fighters and the modern means they used, especially their night-vision capacity. The soldiers added, "Palestinian fighters were never like this before. We must stop describing them as terrorists, and rather should call them warriors." Gideon Levy, the well-known Israeli writer and commentator, holds that the more Hamas's strength grows and Israel realises that a showdown with it will be costly, Israel will be driven to think carefully before waging a military campaign in Gaza or trying to occupy it. Yet the leadership of Hamas and its government in Gaza is functioning on the assumption that the worst possible scenarios will take place. The thing most worrying to the Hamas leadership is the fact that Israeli plans to wage a large-scale campaign on the Gaza Strip are no longer tied to meeting specific goals on the ground such as stopping the firing of missiles on Israeli settlements near Gaza or putting an end to the smuggling operations that Israel claims the resistance movements carry out. In contrast, it has become tied to an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) under American auspices to implement the first stage of the so-called roadmap. This stage obliges the PA to break up and disarm the resistance movements and halt incitement against the occupiers. The PA has begun to meet its obligations under the roadmap whereby Palestinian security agencies in the West Bank are carrying out arrest campaigns against Hamas activists and trying to tempt more Fatah activists to disarm in return for a promise from Israel that it will stop pursuing them. In Gaza, however, as Abu Mazen's security agencies have no real presence there, Israel has decided to fulfil this mission by invading the Gaza Strip and striking hard at the resistance movements. In particular it will target Hamas and seek to topple its government so as to prepare the way for Fatah's return to rule in the Gaza Strip. Yehia Moussa, deputy head of the Hamas parliamentary bloc, stresses that Hamas is preparing for this scenario and is determined to see it fail. "This will be a proxy war that seeks to reinstate the conditions prior to the military manoeuvres, not only to get rid of Hamas, but to create an appropriate political environment that would allow Abu Mazen to offer additional concessions to Israel so as to reach a settlement to the conflict that does not cross Israeli red lines," he told the Weekly. Yet Hamas expects a more complicated situation than that indicated, one that goes beyond the Israeli military response. A high-ranking source in Hamas told the Weekly that Hamas has obtained information stating that the American administration, Israel, and the Salam Fayyad government recently discussed the possibility of concentrating NATO forces in Gaza once the Israeli army completes its operations there. The goal of this would be for the forces to maintain the new conditions until Abu Mazen's security agencies were able to resume control of the Gaza Strip. This source said that Spain announced last Friday that its government was prepared to send forces to the region if requested to do so, and if an agreement was reached between the Palestinians and Israelis. The Weekly has also learnt that Hamas has informed a number of European governments, through go-betweens, that they are committing a grave mistake if they agree to send their forces to the Gaza Strip. Yet all of this concerns Hamas's preparations to deal with a wide-scale and long-term military operation. What of its preparations for dealing with the current siege and the collective punishments that are expected to grow harsher? Nehad Al-Sheikh Khalil, a researcher specialised in the affairs of Islamist movements, suggests that Hamas is betting on Palestinian human resources with their high capacity for patience and endurance. He notes that the Hamas leadership has tried to change the way these resources are employed by turning patience into proactive energy in dealing with the siege. Al-Sheikh Khalil says that Hamas is now talking about projects for intensifying agricultural production despite the limited land allocated for cultivation. "In Hamas, they view the siege as an opportunity for reformulating Palestinian society and building an economy of resistance based on transforming Palestinian society from one that lives off foreign aid to one with the ability to work and support itself," he says. Al-Sheikh Khalil stresses that despite the pressure of Israeli and American interests, the collusion of the Fayyad government and the Arab world's silence over the siege, Palestinians are capable of surprising everyone and breaking the siege. He says that it is not impossible for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to march to the borders and attempt to cross them, unwilling to die under the pressure of the siege. Some in Hamas hold that the movement's leadership must show more flexibility in order to convince the Palestinian president to dialogue with it, arguing that the dialogue's success may lead to the end of the siege. Nassereddin Al-Shair, former minister of education and a West Bank Hamas leader, holds that the only exit from the tragic situation lies in national dialogue, and that a consensus must be reached regarding a sole legitimate authority. "When the Hamas leadership says that it is prepared to dialogue with Abu Mazen, but without conditions, this is a problem, because in this manner there is no way to advance towards dialogue," he told the Weekly. Al-Shair holds that, in fact, Hamas has made its own conditions by stipulating that the security agencies be reorganised. Yet he also holds that Abu Mazen's insistence on reinstating the conditions existent prior to the military manoeuvring causes problems no less serious. "There are conditions one can revert to, and ones you can't," he says. Yet it is clear that not everyone in Hamas agrees with Al-Shair. Some believe that Hamas has done everything it can to convince Abu Mazen to agree to engage in dialogue. In any case, the Hamas leadership is acting on the basis that the worst possible scenarios may take place and assuming that even if dialogue were resumed, the siege may continue. Several Hamas leaders suggest that even settling on the Mecca agreement and forming a national unity government will not lift the siege being imposed on the Palestinian people. Whatever the conditions, it's clear that Hamas is determined to follow through with all of its mechanisms of adaptation. It is preparing for the worst in terms of security and economics, and exerting efforts to prevent a return to the conditions that existed prior to the military manoeuvring that resulted in it taking control of the Strip.
