The leader of a secret wing within Hamas said that the Palestinian unity government and its leader Mahmoud Abbas are "part of the siege on the Gaza Strip" and "part of the stumbling blocks on the way to its rehabilitation," the Times of Israel reports.
Fathi Hamad controls a network of armed cells within the Gaza Strip and is using it to carry out attacks against senior members of Fatah.
Hamad has the support of many in the Gaza Strip and is close with the head of Hamas' military wing. His support is creating a struggle with leaders that want Hamas to become more moderate, and perhaps even abandon terrorism.
Hamad doesn’t hide his extremist positions against reconciliation with Abbas or Fatah, and on Wednesday he participated in a meeting of the Legislative Council in Gaza, which was convened in order to send a symbolic message to the Palestinian Authority: Time has expired for the national reconciliation government. Hamas is still ruling in Gaza.
This is not the position of all the Hamas officials in the Palestinian enclave and abroad. According to Palestinian sources in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as Arab and Israeli sources, Hamas is torn today between two fundamentally different approaches, and the dispute is threatening to tear the movement apart.
Hamad is the most prominent representative of the extremist faction, which seeks to prevent any possibility of giving up control of Gaza or of reconciliation with the Palestinian Authority. There are several more senior officials from Hamas’s armed wing with him, as well as individuals considered close to Iran in the political wing. On December 24, one of them even met with Ali Larijani, the chairman of the Iranian parliament, as part of Hamas’s attempts to reconcile with Iran. The head of the military wing, Marwan Issa, is also considered close to Hamad, but wasn’t aware of the activities of his secret cells.
On the other side stand the Hamas "politicians" who want to examine a new path for the organization, perhaps even abandoning terrorism. In this camp, Arab sources have mentioned Moussa Abu Marzouk, who is currently in the Strip, Khalil al-Hiya, and even former Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh, who joined them recently. The head of Hamas’s political bureau, Khaled Mashaal, also supports the more moderate line.