A year after taking Gaza, Hamas considers its future

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GAZA CITY -- Rabieh al-Masri has an impressive title. The trio of gold stars on the shoulder of his black uniform identifies him as a captain, the commander of the Palestinian Coast Guard.But it's an empty honor.The Coast Guard is jokingly referred to here as the Hamas Navy. It consists of about 400 men, but has only a single rubber dinghy that's kept well away from the waterfront.Al-Masri and his Kalashnikov-toting men are left with little to do but walk the beaches and glare at the Israeli gunboats floating just at the horizon.The boatless state of the Hamas Navy is symbolic of the Islamist group, which seized control of the Gaza Strip last year after routing rival Fatah in six bloody days of clashes that left 118 people dead.In the aftermath of the battle, Hamas triumphantly raised its green banners over nearly every building in this crowded coastal territory. But the victory proved to be a Pyrrhic one.What the Islamists won control of was a violent and impoverished mini-state, one that was soon to be completely isolated from the outside world.The act of the takeover -- which Hamas says was necessary to prevent a coup against the elected government that Fatah was plotting with U.S. aid -- turned both Hamas and Gaza's 1.5 million citizens into pariahs that the international community avoided and Israel punished with a crippling economic blockade.Now, some top figures in Hamas wonder whether they didn't make a giant strategic error by seizing control of Gaza. They're inching toward reconciliation with other Palestinian groups.The territory's economy, already devastated by four decades of Israeli occupation, has been almost completely dismantled by the economic siege. Necessities such as fuel and basic construction materials have been scarce for months. Bottled water is the latest thing to disappear from the stocks of Gaza's struggling grocery stores.Only about 40 of the ministry's usual 200 staff have continued to come to work since the takeover, the rest heeding a call from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who promised to continue paying salaries to workers who stayed home and boycotted the Hamas regime.Only a trickle of foreign diplomats has visited the building in the past 12 months. And no foreign minister has ever come to visit Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader who theoretically holds the post of foreign minister, in addition to being prime minister and finance minister of the Hamas administration.Even Haniyeh rarely comes here. The ministry is effectively run by his aide, Ahmed Yousef, a U.S.-educated adviser who speaks fluent English and represents the movement's most moderate wing.Yousef casts the events of a year ago as something of an accidental takeover. He said it was supposed to be a small-scale operation to destroy a few specific elements within Fatah that were plotting against Hamas' democratically elected government (Hamas won control of the Palestinian legislature in a 2006 vote). It turned into an effective military coup when institutions such as the police and other security services supposedly loyal to Abbas suddenly collapsed, he said.In Yousef's telling, Hamas was "forced" to take over locations such as the presidential residence in order to maintain order and to prevent looting. Looking back, he and other senior Hamas figures sound almost apologetic."It's not an occasion we'd like to celebrate," he said. "We didn't mean to give the impression of a coup d'etat. We only wanted to target those groups which were working against the government."Ghazi Hamad, another top aide to Haniyeh, acknowledged that Hamas was "exhausted" from a year of dealing with one crisis after another. He emphasized that the movement now badly wants unconditional talks with Abbas and Fatah. Abbas recently signaled that he might also be ready to negotiate after a year of refusing to do so."This is a catastrophe, a disaster. We have to go back to national unity," Hamad said. "Gaza is not our national project. We're looking for a Palestinian state."Hamas' exhaustion doesn't yet mean that the blockade strategy employed by Israel and the West is working. While Hamas has been stuck in crisis management and Gaza has been rendered ungovernable for the past year by the embargo, none of Israel's aims has been achieved either.Rockets -- sometimes fired by Hamas, more often by Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian militant groups -- continue to fall nearly every day on southern Israeli cities. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned that Israel, which withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005, was considering a major military operation in the territory.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)