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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Some officials in Israel and the U.S. fear that the withdrawal poses a formidable risk: it could open the way to a Hamas take-over in Gaza from the failing rule of Arafat's Palestinian Authority, or possibly a Palestinian civil war. But Hamas leaders tell TIME their organization has no intention of stepping in to replace the Authority officially so long as Israel continues to occupy any of the disputed territory, and it has "forbidden" a fratricidal struggle for control.

To the outside world, Hamas' weapons of choice are as morally repugnant as they are tactically futile: each ruthless suicide bombing, drive-by shooting or rocket salvo on Israeli targets guarantees an equally lethal Israeli response. Sharon proposed the execution of Yassin at a March 16 meeting of his security cabinet, two days after Hamas suicide bombers, the first in recent years from Gaza, killed 10 Israelis near the port of Ashdod. Hamas leaders have been in hiding since last August, when the group broke a seven-week summer cease-fire with the suicide bombing of a Jerusalem bus. After that attack, Israel announced that leaders of the group's political wing, as well as its militants, were now "marked for death." Israeli forces subsequently assassinated a relatively moderate Hamas leader, Ismail Abu Shanab, and wounded another, Mahmoud al-Zahar, by bombing his residence. Now Israeli security officials say every single member of Hamas is on Israel's hit list, starting with Rantisi, Yassin's successor. "We dealt them a blow," Cabinet minister Uzi Landau told TIME. "But if we stop here, it might be counterproductive. We should make them sweat a little."

Hamas has few friends in the world: it long ago lost the war of perceptions. Even though in 1967 the U.N. declared Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to be illegal and all Western governments agree that the Palestinians deserve a homeland, Hamas' assaults on civilians have tainted its case. The U.S. has officially outlawed the group. Washington contends Hamas' actions are a prime obstacle to resolving the 56-year conflict pitting Palestinians against Jews for the land they both claim. President George W. Bush has demanded that Hamas be "dismantled" as a prerequisite to moving ahead on his road map for peace in the Middle East, and he insists that Arafat's Palestinian Authority do the job. The weakened Authority's failure to do that has stopped the road map in its tracks.

But Hamas won't go away. Despite constant losses, the group has shown remarkable powers of regeneration. An ever growing portion of the Palestinian population backs the movement, as the thousands of sympathizers accompanying the slain sheik to his grave attest. Despairing of a better future, people increasingly share the view that attacks, even suicidal ones, on any Israelis are all they have left as acts of resistance to armed occupation. The bloodshed and economic devastation brought on by the intifadeh, or uprising, launched in 2000, together with Israel's U.S.-blessed campaign to eviscerate Arafat's power, have broken down law and order in much of the territories, leaving Hamas the most disciplined outfit around. Today Hamas' influence is as powerful as any in Palestinian society.

From afar, militants like Ishtawi might seem like little more than a bunch of armed zealots with a penchant for senseless violence. But Hamas' hold on the Palestinian imagination is far more complex, rooted in its ability to offer pride to a wounded people and, on a more practical level, social services that the corrupt and ineffective Palestinian Authority doesn't deliver. Hamas the violent militant movement is hard enough to confront. Hamas the do-gooding social-work organization is a doubly perplexing challenge. "Hamas," explains a young Gaza City man donning his shoes after Friday prayers, "reflects what Palestinians want."

Martyrs Inc.
It is tempting in the post-9/11 world to assume that all groups labeled terrorist are alike, made in the image of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda. But the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its Arabic acronym Hamas (which translates as "zeal"), is not an international organization of hate committed to bringing down the Western world. To date, Hamas has leveled its fire only against the occupying power, Israel. While religious faith is fundamental to membership in Hamas, and its philosophy takes root in the Islamist precepts of jihad and martyrdom, much of the world agrees in the justness of the aspiration for a national homeland for the Palestinians.

But Hamas has taken the Palestinian dream to extremes. Since its birth under the guiding hand of Sheik Yassin in the early months of the first intifadeh 16 years ago, Hamas has stuck to a hard-line charter that calls for the expulsion of the "Zionist invaders" from all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The group wants to establish an Islamic state in this territory through jihad, or holy struggle. It considers Arafat and other less strident Palestinian leaders to be collaborationist sellouts. Though Hamas has a political face, it has built its strength on the terrorist tactics employed by the clandestine military wing and on the blood it sheds. In the past three years, Israel says, Hamas has been responsible for 425 attacks that took the lives of 377 people. The cruel practice of suicide bombing is its prime weapon.