Radicals On The Rise

By Johanna McGeary

You'd think it would be easy to put a frail, 65-year-old quadriplegic under house arrest. But it's never been harder to quell the activists of Hamas. When armed police from Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority moved in to surround the Gaza City home of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, founder and spiritual leader of the movement whose name means zeal, calls rang from the loudspeakers of local mosques, "Go and rescue Sheik Yassin!" The security men were greeted with a hail of stones and occasional gunfire from several thousand defiant Hamas loyalists determined to show Arafat, just like Israel, how much they have become a force to be reckoned with.

In the past 14 months of the second Palestinian uprising, no group has benefited from the failure of diplomacy and the rise of violence as much as Hamas. The militant Islamist movement that takes responsibility for 19 of the 36 suicide bombings that have claimed 91 victims since September 2000 is riding a wave of support from despairing Palestinians for its unrelenting vigor in striking back against Israel. In polls, its popularity outstrips that of Arafat's mainstream party, its young men flock eagerly to the call of martyrdom, and its latest round of murderous assaults may prove the final death blow to a peace process the group has long sought to kill, believing as it does that Israel is an alien entity on Islamic land that must be destroyed.

After Hamas bombers claimed 25 victims in Israel last week, the isolation of Yassin made a good show of a crackdown, but little more. The infirm cleric in his white robes, confined to a wheelchair since a teenage sports accident paralyzed his limbs, speaks in a soprano pitch so soft a listener can barely hear him. But for years his fiery exhortations preaching eternal warfare until Israel is driven into the sea made him the dominant figure in an organization that turned his words into action. Now he is largely a figurehead. He presides over Hamas' sprawling social services and sets its intransigent political tone. He's revered for his spiritual guidance and daily rallying of the faithful. But the days in which he used to press the button and send supporters to carry out operations are gone.

That responsibility has been grabbed by a variety of other hands. The deadly business of Hamas is run by its shadowy military wing. Only the most dedicated and disciplined are allowed into the tight little cells that carry out attacks. Perhaps 200-men strong, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigade, named for a Muslim preacher who died leading a revolt against Jewish immigration in the 1930s, does the dirty work, plotting actions against Israeli troops and civilians. Hamas operations include kidnappings of soldiers and drive-by shootings, but those exploding human bombs are the spearhead of the group's campaign.

These days, Hamas doesn't need to recruit suicide bombers; there are almost too many volunteers. Men embittered by years of misery and humiliation gather at the feet of a new generation of Hamas preachers like the charismatic Sheik Hassan Yussef. His Friday sermons, full of mythic stories of great Islamic battles but also highly critical of Arafat's corrupt regime and its compromises with Israel, urge them toward violent confrontation with the Jews. As Hamas leaders like Yussef tell their adherents, Palestinians may not have tanks or gunships, but they have one thing Israel doesn't: men willing to blow themselves up for their cause.

Now, though, according to Palestinian security officials, Hamas has acquired a potent new conventional weapon. Some months ago, according to these sources, Iranian-backed operatives of the Lebanese militant group Hizballah bought or stole a North Korean-designed rocket from Syrian soldiers and passed it on to Hamas. The weapon was smuggled into the Gaza Strip, where a special Hamas engineering unit was set up to replicate it. At the end of October, Hamas launched the first of its Qassam 1 rockets toward an Israeli town. The attack was a dud; the rocket landed in an empty field. But with a range of 3 miles--much longer than the mortars Hamas currently fires at nearby Israeli settlements--the Qassam 1 would add a frightening new dimension to its campaign of violence. Israeli intelligence officials refer to the rocket as a "new Katyusha," potentially capable of spreading the same kind of chaos inside Israel that Hizballah used to provoke when it fired those Russian-made rockets from Lebanon.

Israel has tried and failed to decapitate Hamas, and that task, should he take it on, would be no easier for Arafat. There is no mastermind without whom the military apparatus falls apart. After all, its actions are cheap and simple and take no special genius: hit-and-run attacks on Israeli soldiers, suicide bombings. So whenever one set of leaders is assassinated or rounded up, it's easy for another to take its place. In the past few months, Hamas has instituted a multitiered system of automatic replacements, borrowed from the communist underground of the 1950s. In each city or rural area, Hamas sets up three leadership groups: if the first team is killed, a second immediately takes its place, then a third. It takes some time for Israeli and Palestinian intelligence to figure out the successions. After Israel wiped out the two top Hamas men in the West Bank city of Nablus last summer, a local Palestinian Authority official complained to Arafat that he couldn't identify the new chain of command to deal with.

If it's hard to round up the largely anonymous military commanders, it's not much easier to rope in well-known political leaders. Abdul Aziz Rantisi, a tough, uncompromising medical doctor, is the main political figure in Gaza. Last week he slipped underground to evade the Palestinian Authority sweep. Khaled Meshal, the man the Mossad poisoned in Amman in 1997 and whose life was then saved by Jordan's King Hussein, stays permanently out of reach. He is the organization's overall boss, but he gives his orders from safe havens in Syria and Qatar. Mousa Abu Marzook, who was forced out of the U.S. and then Jordan, is a political leader from his base in Syria.

Money forms another basic root of Hamas' power. Having been sweet-talked into helping with finances, Iran now provides some $20 million to $30 million a year, according to a Western diplomat in Tehran. Cash also flows in from Islamic charities and wealthy private backers in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Officials around the Arab world acknowledge that their citizens contribute to Hamas, but they tend to justify the group's operations as legitimate resistance to the continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. Says Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal: "Someone who is fighting for the liberation of his country is not a terrorist."

Another chunk of Hamas' money comes from Muslim charities in the West, including the U.S. and Britain. The Holy Land Foundation, the largest Muslim charity in America, has been a notable donor, according to U.S. officials who seized the organization's assets last week (see box). Hamas' popular appeal, especially strong among women, owes much to the payouts and services it brings to suffering Palestinians. The charitable side of Hamas is its greatest strength and its best cover. About 60% of the budget goes to dawah, the legitimate network of schools, mosques, orphanages, clinics, youth clubs, athletic teams and libraries that Hamas has spread into virtually every corner of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In Nablus before the new intifadeh, 3,700 families received financial help from Hamas; now 7,000 do. Among the services offered are lifetime annuities to sustain the families of suicide bombers recruited from Hamas classrooms and soccer fields. "These guys kill Israelis, but they also secure their families from poverty," says a Hamas activist in the West Bank.

Hamas has also figured out how to make political inroads in a society that has few of the usual manifestations of democracy. Its supporters dominate most university student councils, which are important gauges of youthful allegiance. On Nov. 12, when students at An-Najah National University in Nablus voted for their council, Hamas increased to 48 seats from 42, while Arafat's party, Fatah, slid from 34 to 28. Hamas helped secure those votes earlier in the year, when it opened four apartment buildings where students pay just $40 a month for room, board and utilities.

Ever since Arafat went home in 1994 to run the self-governing body set up by the Oslo peace accords, Hamas has posed a threat to him as well as to Israel. Arafat lets Hamas recruit, build bombs, send out suicide missions, when it suits him. Hamas in turn has tolerated the Palestinian Authority in the name of unity, but has always "reserved the right to resist the occupation." Whenever Hamas' unyielding violence has challenged Arafat too hard, he has cracked down. He arrested hundreds of militants and removed firebrand Hamas preachers from their mosques in 1996, after a torrent of suicide bombings nearly undid the Oslo accords. When Hamas militants car-bombed a bus filled with settler schoolchildren in 1998, setting off another crisis with Israel, Arafat put Yassin under house arrest. Both times, though, Hamas' popular support was at a low ebb among Palestinians who believed peace negotiations would prove fruitful.

Few believe that now. So on the street, last week, Hamas showed off its power. In more than one case, supporters faced down Arafat's police when they came to make arrests. Neighbors in Bethlehem's Deheisha refugee camp spat at Palestinian Authority troops who tried to pick up Issa Marzook, a Hamas activist and correspondent for Hizballah TV, as a throng ganged around them shouting "Spies! Collaborators! Dogs!" The police retreated without Marzook. Says an Arafat aide: "Hamas is a political power and not a security threat only." Hamas officials voice their defiance. "Arafat is the chairman, but we shall not follow his orders," Abu Marzook told TIME at his office in the outskirts of Damascus last week. "He wants to implement the U.S. and Israeli orders. We shall not accept that."

The arithmetic is simple: when Palestinians lose faith in the peace process, the popularity of Hamas rises. Its fundamentalist hard core is still small, but it attracts sympathizers disillusioned by the failure of everything else. Most Palestinians do not buy Hamas' call to exterminate Israel or make their longed-for state a strict Islamic one. But most now embrace its suicide bombings as the only means they have left to resist an unremitting occupation. The question is whether that newfound popularity is just a flirtation or a permanent change of heart.

No matter what Arafat may do, Hamas remains a danger to everyone engaged in the Middle East. Sheik Yassin can be shut up in his house for a while; hundreds of rank and file can be made to serve jail time. Even the zeal that drives Hamas to kill civilians may be tamped down for a time. But never, it seems, for good. Already, sources in the Hamas military wing tell TIME, somewhere in a Hamas safe house, militants inflamed by the American war in Afghanistan are debating whether it is time to add U.S. targets in Israel and the territories to their hit list.

--Reported by George Baghdadi/Damascus, Jamil Hamad, Aharon Klein and Matt Rees/Jerusalem, Scott MacLeod/Cairo and Azadeh Moaveni/Tehran

With reporting by George Baghdadi/Damascus, Jamil Hamad, Aharon Klein and Matt Rees/Jerusalem, Scott MacLeod/Cairo and Azadeh Moaveni/Tehran