Inside Hamas

SUNGSU CHO/POLARIS FOR TIME
THE FACE OF TERROR: Hamas operatives like these activists lead lives so secret that their militant identities are often hidden from their own families

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You can't just volunteer to join al-Qassam, though. Hamas' secrecy seems to enhance its appeal. Only the so-called political wing has a public face. Everyone knew Sheik Yassin as Hamas' founder and spiritual head, the only cleric in the pantheon of Palestinian leaders. They know a few of the other out-front elite, like Rantisi, a pediatrician and Islamic ideologue who had been Hamas' No. 2; al-Zahar, a surgeon who teaches at Gaza's Islamic University and also leans toward the relative hard line; and the much lamented Abu Shanab, who reflected Hamas' more moderate side. Everyone is aware of Musa Abu Marzook and Khaled Mashaal, two tough decision makers who help run Hamas from increasingly constricted exile in Damascus, and the more pragmatic Ismail Haniya. But after them, Hamas is deliberately obscure. Almost no one knows the identities of the operational militants until they're caught or killed. Al-Qassam men don't show off; they don't swagger. Ishtawi's brother knew Ahmed was a militant, but his brother had no knowledge of Ahmed's stature or deadly exploits until he read the leaflet that boasted of them, published by Hamas after Ahmed's death.

Hamas is divided and subdivided into endless compartmentalized cells responsible for discrete tasks: recruitment, planning, weapons development, operations, security. Apart from a few top guns like Ishtawi, who was an overall operations commander and liaison to West Bank Hamas groups, cell members know nothing about units outside their own. In Gaza, when a cell is decapitated, fresh leaders are ready to spring into place. "Even if Sheik Yassin got killed," a Hamas activist told me last month, "Hamas is a big organization now and even he can be replaced. When a leader is killed, it makes us all tougher and ready to pass the torch to fresh fighters." Brigadier General Yossi Kupperwasser, head of research and intelligence for the I.D.F., agrees the group is impossible to contain. "Say they have 150 in the West Bank today involved in terror," he says. "Even if we kill the ones we know about, tomorrow they'll have 150 more."

Israel says the distinction Hamas makes between its political and military wings is fictitious. And Sharon's aggressive campaign of assassination, targeting Hamas from top to bottom, including the formerly immune political figures, has altered Hamas' behavior. Militants, for example, have stopped going to the hospital when a confrere is injured because Israel will monitor the place to pick up their trails. Unable to use phones or cars, they communicate by encrypted e-mail or in hurried personal rendezvous. The impact on Hamas' public leaders has been even more dramatic. Last September, al-Zahar's house was flattened by an Israeli bomb that wounded him and tore his son to pieces. Now he, Rantisi and Haniya, another of the political brain trust, live in hiding. They have left home to go into safe houses in Gaza's warren of refugee camps where Hamas supporters are eager to shelter them. The leadership no longer travels in cars but walks, sticking to back alleys instead of main arteries. The bosses do not answer incoming calls; they use fresh cell phones with batteries and SIM cards that can be removed when they want to place a call. The political heads don't attend "martyrs'" funerals, as they used to, and their rare public appearances take place mainly on television. Before, an activist tells me, the leaders gave the broad mass of the movement moral support by appearing in public. Now they give moral support by hiding, because Hamas' people feel their leaders are safe.

The dirty work of Hamas is devised and executed by killers like the man I knew initially as Mohammed. When I met him the first time, on a downtown Gaza City street, the meeting had been arranged to look like a casual encounter as we walked amid the regular Hamas rally after Friday noon prayers. He was worried I might be a spotter for Israeli military hit teams who employ informants, sometimes unwittingly, to lure targets into range. But he felt comfortably anonymous among the noisy, armed Hamas partisans.

At the exact time specified, a man with dark-smudged eyes and the thin tracings of an Islamic beard approached me. Mohammed, 24, looked strong and loose limbed beneath a plain tan shirt and dark pants and proved surprisingly candid about his clandestine career. He said he had a university degree and a regular job as an accountant, and a wife who blessed his potential death prior to their wedding six months before.