Hamas wields brutal control

BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip — With both legs badly bruised from a vicious beating, Shaher Abu Oda can get around only with a painful shuffle.

In the Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanoun, however, he is just one of many young men bearing limps, plaster casts and stitches — the black-and-blue aftermath of an unprecedented crackdown on dissent by Gaza’s new rulers, the Islamist group Hamas.

Hamas officials snatched Mr. Abu Oda off the streets two weeks ago as he tried to find his younger brother Miqbil, himself badly beaten after club-wielding Hamas policemen broke up a wedding party.

The revelers’ crime had been to sing a few songs associated with the Fatah party, the rival Palestinian faction that Hamas ousted from the Gaza Strip two months ago.

“They threw me in a room,” said Mr. Abu Oda. “From 11:30 to 3:30 in the morning, they came in every 15 minutes and beat me with sticks, fists, kicks and a black leather crop.”

As many as 50 people are thought to have been arrested in Gaza’s Beit Hanoun district around the night of the wedding, and similar sweeps have taken place elsewhere in Gaza since then.

The detentions and beatings appear to mark the end of a relative honeymoon period for Hamas, which seized control of Gaza after five days of battle in June.

In the early days of the group’s reign, Hamas aggressively cracked down on drug dealers, thieves and violent clans, but it also freed British Broadcasting Corp. journalist Alan Johnston from the clutches of a criminal faction aligned with al Qaeda.

Such activities led to calls for Britain and Europe to open formal dialogue with Hamas, despite its commitment to the destruction of the state of Israel.

Now, though, human rights groups and ordinary Gazans say Hamas is committing the same crimes as its Fatah predecessors, whose corruption and brutality were one of the main reasons why support for Hamas grew.

“We are receiving reports of political detentions every day,” said Mahmoud Abu Rahma of the Gaza City-based Al Mezan Center for Human Rights. “Hamas is conducting wide sweeps and interrogations to collect information. The interrogations include harsh treatment, and in many cases, torture and beatings.”

At a protest in Gaza City on Friday, Hamas gunmen broke up a demonstration by Fatah loyalists by firing at the crowd and smashing journalists’ cameras. Similar treatment is often meted out in the opposite direction in the Fatah-controlled West Bank, where dozens, if not hundreds, of Hamas activists are jailed.

However, because Hamas portrayed itself to the Palestinians as an upright alternative to decades of corrupt Fatah rule, such behavior rankles all the more.

“Fatah arrested and tortured people, too,” said a senior official from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an independent political faction. “But during Fatah’s rule, we could give our opinions and say anything we wanted about the Fatah leadership. Today, people are afraid of saying anything about Hamas.”

At least two detainees have died in Hamas custody since July 11.

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