Hamas: Dying for Israel's Destruction

By MARGUERITE MICHAELS

Adnan sat in the sand with some of his Palestinian neighbors just a few yards away from an open sewer in the Gaza Strip's Shati Camp and promised the destruction of Israel. "Yasser Arafat means nothing to me," he said. "I want all of Palestine back." Adnan, who gave only his first name for fear of arrest by military authorities, lost his job in Israel last March when the government sealed off the violence-riddled Gaza Strip. "My parents were thrown out of their town in 1948," says Adnan, 25. "Any Russian Jew can live there now, but I have never seen it. We are ready to fight and die as martyrs rather than accept this."

The "we" Adnan refers to are his fellow supporters of Hamas. Of all the organizations eager to kill the rapprochement between Israel and the Arabs, the militant Muslim fundamentalist group is probably the greatest threat. An acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement that literally means "zeal," Hamas wants nothing less than the destruction of the Jewish state, followed by the establishment of an Islamic Palestine as a precursor to a greater pan-Arab union. The organization was born in the misery and despair of the teeming refugee camps of the Gaza Strip five years ago, two months after the beginning of the intifadeh. Within three years the fundamentalists that the Israelis had once allowed to exist as a counterbalance to the P.L.O. were outlawed as the most serious security problem in the occupied territories. Hamas' appeal is both social and political. With money from Iran and private Arab benefactors in the gulf, the organization runs clinics and kindergartens -- and candidates for chamber of commerce elections. Preaching radical solutions from the mosques, Hamas has rapidly won converts disenchanted with the foibles and failures of the P.L.O. It now claims support from a majority of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and at least 40% of West Bank Arabs.

The group's aggressive violence has made Israel's occu-pation of the Gaza Strip moredangerous than ever. Israeli soldiers are constantly stoned and frequently shot at. Civilians in Israel are often targets. When three factory workers were partly disemboweled in Jaffa three years ago, the Israeli government arrested hundreds of Hamas activists and deported four of their leaders. Hamas proceeded to increase its attacks, using guns and knives and an occasional roadside explosive charge. Israel retaliated against the escalating violence last December by deporting 415 leaders and supporters of Islamic movements, particularly Hamas, to wintry southern Lebanon. But their banishment brought them attention from all over the world and made them heroes at home.

The Israeli Defense Forces see the militant group as a double security threat once the territories are granted autonomy. They fear Hamas will go after Israeli settlers and the new Palestinian authorities in the Gaza Strip and Jericho, provoking reprisals that could easily turn into a bloodbath. They are also worried about how much easier it will be to stage large-scale terrorist operations into Israel. The Israelis will still command the bridge connecting Jordan and Jericho, but they will no longer control Gaza port. Today the Palestinians have no missiles that can reach Israel from the occupied territories, but a simple, crude Katyusha rocket smuggled in by sea could hit the Israeli city of Ashkelon, only eight miles away.

With reporting by Lara Marlowe/Gaza Strip