Hamas cries foul over PA's West Bank 'police regime'

More than 100 charitable agencies shut as group says it is being unfairly targeted by Palestinian Authority after 2007 Fatah ouster.

A Palestinian guard and Hamas prisoners at a prison in the West Bank city of Nablus.

RAMALLAH // It may have garnered international praise, but for Hamas politicians the Palestinian Authority's security campaign in the West Bank is a politically motivated attempt to undermine the Islamist movement in the territory. Earlier this week, Hamas yet again protested the arrests of some its members, this time 17 from four different West Bank towns on Sunday. For Mahmoud Ramahi, a Hamas legislator from Ramallah, the PA budget allocation for the security services, the arrests, and the closures of more than 100 charitable societies with links to Hamas all point to a "political plan to target Hamas and the resistance, imposed on the PA by the US in return for continued donations".

The "security success" that the government of Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, likes to pride itself on, said Mr Ramahi in his office on Tuesday, is "creating a police regime in the West Bank." That is not the way international actors see it. Tony Blair, the Middle East Quartet representative, has praised Palestinian security forces for a three-year crackdown that began after Mahmoud Abbas, the PA president, dismissed the Hamas-led government of Ismail Haniyeh in the wake of the violence that saw Hamas oust Fatah-affiliated security forces in the Gaza Strip in 2007. The efforts of the security forces have been instrumental in imposing law and order on often chaotic West Bank streets, Mr Blair had said.

Major Gen Adnan Damiri, the spokesman of the PA's security forces, rejected the idea that Hamas had been targeted and said the security services had instead succeeded in removing "illegal weapons" from all militant groups in the West Bank in order to ensure that the government of Mr Fayyad could get on with its programme and abide by its international obligations, including ending attacks on Israeli targets.

As for the charitable societies that had been closed, Mr Damiri said they had all been used to illegally funnel money to militant groups. But Hamas officials point to their closure and the thousands of arrests of Hamas members as evidence that the PA is not concerned about security per se, but rather about hurting Hamas. Of 164 charitable institutions that the movement ran in the West Bank, 138 have been closed completely in the past three years, according to Mr Ramahi. The rest had been allowed to continue only after their executive boards were replaced. Mr Ramahi said the institutions had been targeted because they provided a "link between Hamas and the people".

He denied that charities had funnelled money to Hamas, and pointed out that after the September 11 attacks, regulations for charities had been tightened to such a degree that even if people wanted to launder money through charities, "there was no way to do so". Nevertheless, it is clear that the focus on charitable societies forms part of a larger financial security strategy that one Palestinian intelligence source said was a "carefully planned, front line" effort to impose control over the flows of money into the West Bank.

This effort has included tighter controls over money exchange shops and greater oversight of bank accounts. Charities had been one way to launder money from abroad, the intelligence officer said, citing an example from Hebron where one charity had 52 security guards on its payroll. "These turned out to be salaries for Izzedine al Qassam members [the armed wing of Hamas]," said the source, who declined to be identified but who is intimately familiar with the financial investigations of the Palestinian security services.

Officially, the PA maintains that the charities were closed because of financial irregularities. But while the intelligence source maintained that the charities had been a way for Hamas to bring in money, he said they were not necessarily the most effective way. He also conceded that many of the accused charities had yet to have their cases heard before the courts. The focus on Hamas and its institutions, he added, had been a political decision. "There was a strong feeling that if Hamas was not targeted, what happened in Gaza could be repeated here."

Palestinian security sources maintain that Hamas has been debilitated by the crackdown. One claimed that the PA has confiscated as much as US$100 million (Dh367m) in cash from the movement and its institutions. Hamas security sources say that the number is closer to $20m and that the money belongs to families of prisoners and those orphaned in fighting with Israel. Mr Ramahi, meanwhile, rejected that Hamas had been weakened in the West Bank. On the contrary, he said, the closure of charitable institutions was backfiring on the PA.

"These charities looked after 100,000 people. Their closure is an injustice, and for this, people will react." [e-mail]