The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #117493 Message #2541689
Posted By: bobad
17-Jan-09 - 05:26 PM
Thread Name: BS: Israel Moves in.
Subject: RE: BS: Israel Moves in.
Palestinians Against Hamas
Injured Fatah veterans rooting against Hamas PATRICK MARTIN January 7, 2009
RAMALLAH, WEST BANK — When Usama Abu Nahel looks at the conflict in Gaza he feels nothing but contempt. He is one of the people who hate Hamas more than the Israelis do.
It was 19 months ago when Mr. Abu Nahel, then 25 and a member of Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Gaza, was dragged from his house by a group of Hamas militants, taken to one of their warehouses and "kneecapped." He was shot 30 times in the left leg, doctors said; then in the right leg six times.
"As I lay on the ground in agony, they ran over me in their jeep," he recalls.
He'd like to spit as he says this, but not in the neat room he keeps in a house for victims such as him in Ramallah.
There are 17 men, all with stories similar to Mr. Abu Nahel's, who reside in a sprawling house on a quiet street near the entrance to this West Bank city. About 35 other men reside in other locations around town. All were members of the mainstream Fatah movement, founded by the late Yasser Arafat and led now by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. Each was seriously wounded in the fighting that raged between Fatah and Hamas in Gaza in June, 2007. They were brought to Ramallah for hospital and rehabilitative care. They have not been allowed back into Gaza, and their families have not been allowed to join them.
As a group of them gather in Mr. Abu Nahel's room to watch the television coverage of the fighting in Gaza, their emotions come to the surface.
"Hamas works for Iran. They brought us back to the Stone Age," says Mohammed Abu Zakari, 48, who lost one of his legs after a Hamas shooting in the civil conflict. He has left his wife and 12 of his 13 children behind in Gaza. His 13th child, 19-year-old Ahmed, is with him, another Hamas victim whose ankle has been reconstructed.
"I'm happy to see them eradicated," he said, blaming Hamas for the carnage and destruction now taking place in Gaza.
Mahmoud as-Shatat, 23, a former student leader for Fatah, agrees. "Hamas consider us infidels," he said. "They brutalized us, their own people. I have no sympathy for them.