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Inside Gaza, a Landscape Marked by Violent Change
Wounded Palestinian men remove their shirts at Erez crossing before being evacuated to the Israeli side. Israel has kept the crossing closed, leaving hundreds of Palestinians stranded.
(By Emilio Morenatti -- Associated Press)
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After Hamas seized control in Gaza, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas dissolved the Hamas-led power-sharing government, through a decree Hamas officials said was illegal. The result has isolated Gaza from the larger and more populous West Bank.
The government ministries are running here, and Hamas leaders are busy giving the sense that their impasse with Abbas is temporary.
Fatah security services, led by the Preventive Security branch under Mohammed Dahlan, arrested scores of Hamas leaders in 1996 for opposing the 1993 Oslo accords with Israel that established the Palestinian Authority. Many Hamas officials have portrayed their final battle for Gaza as a narrowly focused strike against that element within Fatah that had persecuted them.
"We are not looking to establish a new state here, so we are not interested in international recognition," said Mohammed Madhoun, chief of staff to Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister whom Abbas fired last week. "The issue of this fighting was simply to clean these institutions and buildings of these Fatah people who were calling our followers on the streets."
After a Hamas-issued ultimatum for Fatah forces to give up their guns expired Friday, Hamas fighters began going door-to-door seizing rifles and ammunition. The Hamas fighters have been working from lists seized in the security posts that show which Fatah officers were issued weapons.
"No one is happy with what happened, even some of us here," Madhoun said. "But we are collecting these guns now not for Hamas, but for the Palestinian Authority."
At Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza, a group of doctors crowded into an office off the emergency room to talk about impending shortages. The larger issues of coordinating private cargo shipments with Hamas remain unresolved, but on Tuesday, Israel delivered 20 shipping containers of basic food products, such as cooking oil, and two others of medical supplies.
"Scalpels, some anesthetics, oxygen cylinders," one doctor listed.
"And there are no oxygen pumps for some of the critical patients," chimed in Ramsi Shaban, a 35-year-old neurosurgeon. "We've had some families pumping the oxygen to their wounded relatives by hand for two straight days."
"Each of these two governments we have now only care about themselves, like two brothers living in separate apartments," Shaban added.
Shaban and his colleagues worked round-the-clock shifts at Shifa through the fighting, and their wards became battlefields.
Hobbling into the office on crutches, Ismail Sadr, a 28-year-old emergency room doctor, recounted how he was shot in the foot by a Hamas gunman who had moved with about a dozen others into an operating room in the northern city of Beit Hanoun in search of a wounded Fatah fighter.
