When Khaled Masha'al and Sheik Hassan Nasrallah meet in Tehran this week, theirs will be a handshake to strike fear in the hearts of Israelis. The roving power broker of Hamas, 52, and the fiery 41-year-old cleric who leads Hizballah will be signaling a truce in what has been a violent if largely unheralded struggle to be the leading terror arm of the Palestinian uprising. The two were once allies. But earlier this year, Hizballah decided it wanted to go its own way. Suddenly two of the most efficient and dangerous terror groups in the world were in competition with each other. It was as if two units of the same army had decided at once to see who could fight the enemy more fiercely--and stopped cooperating in the process. The impact of the split was undeniable: a ratcheting up of anti-Israel terror campaigns.
Now, top sources in both organizations tell TIME, Hizballah's backers in the Iranian government have called them together to patch up their dispute and focus them on the jihad against the Jewish state. The Iranians, who have kept Hamas at arm's length until now, hope that by bringing the two together again, they can pool their operations and exert even more deadly pressure on Israel. If the Iranians get their way, it will be a dark day both for Israelis--who will face increasingly professional terrorist attacks--and for Palestinians already suffering under a heavy-handed Israeli backlash. Competition between the two groups generated an uptick in attacks. Coordination will make those strikes even more effective.
If you want to understand the complexity of the battles being fought in the Gaza Strip, take a look at Adnan al-Ghoul's resume. An activist in the first intifadeh, al-Ghoul was deported by Israel to Lebanon in 1992. There he hooked up with Hizballah. Al-Ghoul sneaked back into Gaza City in 1996 with forged documents, but he still maintains close ties with Hizballah--especially since he runs a major bomb factory in Gaza City, according to Palestinian intelligence officials. Al-Ghoul sells hand grenades for $50 and belts packed with TNT for use in suicide bombs for $1,000. His main client is Hamas, and he's also on the payroll of Yasser Arafat's Preventive Security Service. But it's the spreading tentacles of Hizballah in the form of men like al-Ghoul--trained and hardened by fighting in Lebanon--that worry Israel most. At least two Hizballah-style roadside bombs went off in the West Bank last week. Palestinian sources believe they were set by activists working directly for the Beirut organization. Hizballah gained kudos in the Arab world for driving Israel out of southern Lebanon with its guerrilla tactics last year. Now it's making its first major moves into the West Bank and Gaza Strip through old deportees like al-Ghoul who have become power players in the Palestinian underworld because of the expertise in weapons and tactics they acquired from Hizballah.