Hamas waits defiantly as Israel plots its revenge

If Ismail Abu Shanab is a man who frets and suffers fear, it was not evident. Only a few hours earlier, an Israeli combat helicopter had hovered over the same blighted Middle East landscape on which we were standing, and blasted two missiles into its midst.

Four of his fellow Hamas activists and two apparently uninvolved Palestinian men were killed in one of the bloodiest Israeli assassinations of the intifada. It was a foretaste of what Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, yesterday described as a "massive action" against the Islamic-nationalist movement in the Gaza Strip.

A few yards away, looking exhausted, Hamas' "spiritual leader", Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, was spread on a bed, having been placed under house arrest by another septuagenarian Palestinian, Yasser Arafat, whose West Bank headquarters were surrounded anew by Israeli tanks and troops.

And yet nothing seemed to faze Ismail Abu Shanab, a Hamas spokesman in the Gaza Strip. Not repeated questions from us, the journalists, trying to get him to explain how the 3.3 million Palestinians in the occupied territories could possibly benefit from the murder of Israeli men, women and children by Hamas suicide bombers, the 19 Israelis, for instance, who were blown up as they were going to work on a bus in Jerusalem last week.

And not the news that, not for the first time, Hamas was in the crosshairs of both the –Israel army and the hapless and shattered Palestinian Authority security forces, whom Mr Arafat has mobilised again in a move he hopes will convince the outside world that he is cracking down on militancy.

To the annoyance of the Palestinian leadership, Mr Arafat's efforts yesterday did not deter the Israeli government from sending in its forces into the occupied territories to renew its siege of his Ramallah compound, slapping on yet another mass curfew on the population, and declaring six of the eight main Palestinian West Bank towns to be "closed military areas".

This drew angry Palestinian charges that Israel's reoccupation of the area was almost complete, and Ariel Sharon is trying to spike all chances of diplomatic progress.

We were standing, surrounded by a throng of men, several armed, in a sand-carpeted lane outside Sheikh Yassin's ramshackle house in a rundown backstreet south of Gaza City.

Here, in the early hours yesterday, the Palestinian security forces, led by the police, arrived to place the old cleric under house arrived for the second time in the 21-month intifada.

As the Mediterranean sun rose over the wretched 28-mile long strip, there were early-morning clashes between the police and a throng of young Hamas supporters who arrived to protest, leaving two suffering from light bullet wounds.

These are the militants that Mr Arafat has been under persistent pressure from the international community to rein in, a precondition Mr Sharon has made for any diplomatic advancement.

Although Mr Abu Shanab says he is part of Hamas' political and social structure, rather than its military arm, all of Hamas is defined by Israel as the "terrorist infrastructure" that Mr Sharon claims to be trying to root out, so far without success. In Gaza, the movement is supported by an estimated 40 per cent of the 1.2 million Arab population, drawing its support from the strip's poor, conservative and religious people.

By yesterday afternoon, the word "house arrest" not longer accurately described the sheikh's position. The nearest Palestinian police were 100 yards away. No one stopped us when we walked inside his house, to find the sheikh, who is usually in a wheelchair, on a purple woollen blanket spread across a bed, his long yellow-tinged beard sprayed out on his chest.

He was, said Mr Abu Shanab, too weary to talk to us. But Mr Abu Shanab was quite willing to hold forth at length, calming reeling off arguments that sought to justify Hamas' tactics.

He spoke of an organisation that does not care of what the western world thinks about its deeds, because it has convinced itself that that the western world is incapable of being fair to the Palestinians.

It was different in 1996, when hundreds of Hamas activists were jailed by Yasser Arafat; Hamas, he said, agreed to co-operate because there was a political horizon, the prospect that the Oslo negotiations would lead to a Palestinian state.

Not so today. "Things have changed," Mr Abu Shanab said. "At that time (1996) Arafat came with a political perspective, but now, with Arafat under siege from Israeli tanks, where is the political horizon?"

Hamas appears to be banking on the Palestinians – despite curfews and closures and losses – simply outlasting the Israelis in this conflict.

He believes the latter will eventually be unable to tolerate their losses, and will react by changing its leadership and strategy. "We are willing to pay the price so that we reach the point where fatigue in Israeli society will eventually too great."

He saw no prospect of any change emerging from President George Bush's delayed speech on the Middle East. "We have no confidence in Bush and don't trust any of his cabinet," he said and displayed no remorse over the wave of suicide bombings.

"We have told Israelis that if they kill our civilians, we will kill their civilians. They have set the rules for this game. It is a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye. That's the equation."

The prospect of Mr Sharon's declared "massive action" against Hamas – which has reportedly been preparing for a military invasion of Gaza for months – drew a particularly belligerent reaction from the Hamas man.

"Sharon is not going to scare us. We will continue to resist the occupation. The Palestinians are determined to fight to defend Gaza. We are taking precautions." It sounds ominous.