Killing in the West Bank Exposes a Furtive War

Hamas Cleric Apparently Tortured to Death in Custody of Rival Palestinian Authority

KOBAR, West Bank -- When the preacher's body arrived at the hospital, his back was scarlet where he had been whipped with pipes. His legs were black with bruises. His wrists were sliced open and bloodied.

The Palestinian Authority, which had been holding Majd Barghouti in an intelligence-service prison for the previous week, soon declared that the popular Hamas imam, or prayer leader, had died of a heart attack.

But eyewitness accounts, photographs, video and an independent Palestinian investigation released this month suggested that he was tortured to death during his February detention.

"They wanted the sheik to admit something he wasn't going to admit," said Midhat Amriyeh, a 27-year-old laborer who said he witnessed Barghouti's death from a nearby cell. "There was no way out."

Barghouti's killing offers a rare glimpse into a subterranean war that plays out daily in the West Bank, where two Palestinian factions vie for power. Fatah, which dominates the U.S.-backed Palestinian Authority, uses its power in the West Bank to keep Hamas at a disadvantage -- banning Hamas newspapers, breaking up Hamas demonstrations and shutting down Hamas-affiliated social services groups. It has also arrested hundreds of Hamas activists in the West Bank.

Barghouti, who was suspected of involvement in Hamas's military wing, is believed to have been the first to die under interrogation since tensions between the two movements flared into street fighting when Hamas took sole control of the Gaza Strip last June. But the independent report found evidence that torture is regularly used against political prisoners in Palestinian Authority facilities.

"It's very shameful. The fact that the Israelis tortured us should mean that we never torture each other," said Mustafa Barghouti, an independent Palestinian politician who co-wrote the report. He is not directly related to the preacher. "Unfortunately," he said, "some people are repeating what they themselves have been subjected to."

A top Palestinian Authority official, Hussein al-Sheik, said the Palestinian Authority was not trying to kill Majd Barghouti. "We don't have a policy of killing people," he said. "Our policy is to maintain security." The Authority's intelligence service declined several requests to comment.

Congress last year appropriated $86 million in assistance to the Authority's security services, but their officers remain undertrained and their facilities outdated. The investigative report released this month demanded that officials "take steps to punish all those who ordered torture, executed torture, assisted in torturing, supervised torturing or concealed acts of torture."

Sheik and other Authority officials say they need to take strong action to counter Hamas, a radical Islamist movement. The Authority is clearly worried that Hamas has ambitions to extend its power beyond Gaza and into the other half of what could one day be a Palestinian state -- the West Bank.

In January 2006, Hamas defeated Fatah in parliamentary elections. After a power-sharing arrangement crumbled last June, Hamas fighters routed Palestinian Authority security forces.

Historically, Hamas has been stronger in Gaza while Fatah has dominated the West Bank. But the trend lines of Palestinian public opinion in recent months have defied geography: Hamas's popularity is surging across the board and Fatah's is waning. Hamas's appeal relies in part on a militant response to what it sees as Israeli aggression, such as the makeshift rockets that Gazans fire into southern Israel, while Fatah engages in peace talks with Israel that have yielded scant progress.