Yet for Hamas militants, few Fatah-controlled organizations are more reviled. On one trip to Gaza late last year, I listened as Yussef al-Zahar, a leader in Hamas’s Izzedine al-Qassam militia, described being tortured by what he said were Preventive Security operatives in the late 1990s. The men hung Zahar by his ankles, the militant explained, and then beat him on the soles of his feet with a metal mattress spring. Zahar looked visibly sick to his stomach when I asked him about Mohammad Dahlan, Preventive Security’s onetime leader. Dahlan, Zahar sneered, is “more Zionist than the Zionists.”
It comes as little surprise, then, that some of the fiercest fighting in Gaza this week has centered around the central Preventive Security compound in Gaza City. Dozens of masked Hamas gunmen stormed the complex on Thursday under a barrage of small-arms and RPG fire. Once the building was overrun, Hamas loyalists climbed one of the structure’s concrete guard towers and planted a green Hamas flag on top. Some witnesses said remaining Preventive Security officers were frog-marched out of the building in their underwear; others said that some Fatah men had been shot execution-style just outside. (Some 25 Gazans were killed Thursday in the continued fighting, bringing the death toll to more than 90 in the past four days.)
By midweek, few Preventive Security operatives in Gaza had the will to stand and fight. On Wednesday, while Hamas systematically took over police station after police station as it consolidated its control over the territory, some Fatah fighters fled toward the Egyptian border. After a group of them detonated a small explosive device that blew a hole in the border fence, dozens of Preventive Security men rushed through a gap, and out of Gaza. “It was obvious they were running for their lives,” says Said Kaman, a Rafah-based taxi driver who witnessed the explosion. “It was like they were flying in the air. They were so scared. I don’t think they’ll ever come back.”
The collapse of Preventive Security in Gaza was a blow to American policymakers, who have been hoping that forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would be able to hold off a Hamas onslaught. Western diplomats often speak admiringly of Mohammad Dahlan, now a top security adviser to Abbas, as the one figure strong enough to rally the Fatah troops in Gaza. And the U.S. has earmarked tens of millions of dollars in aid to Abbas’s Presidential Guard forces, which have close ties with Preventive Security. Israelis have always been more cautious about aid to Gazan armed groups, but in recent months even some top Israeli officials have supported weapons shipments from neighboring Arab countries.
Yet this week’s gun battles are sure to scramble the American and Israeli calculus. In the West Bank, forces loyal to Abbas remain a formidable presence; Thursday morning its troops swept through the territory, arresting dozens of Hamas figures. Yet in Gaza, even top Preventive Security officers admit that their organization is all but finished. Reached early Thursday evening by NEWSWEEK, one of Preventive Security’s senior leaders in Gaza, who didn’t want to be identified because he was embarrassed, sounded a defeatist note. “When a Preventive Security member used to walk the streets of Gaza, the ground underneath his feet would shake,” he said. Now, he acknowledged, his organization is “left with no future.” If the Hamas conquest continues, that could be true of Fatah’s control of Gaza too.
