Who's in charge?
As a recent breakdown of the ceasefire showed, the next intifada could be by Palestinians against their own government as much as against Israel
THE walls are black with soot, the sofas burned down to their skeletal elements, the computers and telephones melted into cartoon caricatures of themselves. Compared with the battles that raged before it, the torching this week of the Arabic Centre for Research and Study, a small office in Gaza linked to Hamas, was minor. But it was an unusual symptom of how the conflict between Hamas, the Palestinians' main Islamist party, and the Palestinian Authority (PA), run by the secular-minded Fatah party founded by the late Yasser Arafat, might spread.
This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline “Who's in charge?”
From the July 23rd 2005 edition
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