Evidently emboldened by the activities of Osama bin Laden, the Islamic fundamentalist movement Hamas yesterday issued its most brazen challenge yet to Mr Yasser Arafat, asserting that the Palestinian Authority president was losing touch with his public and was haemorrhaging support.
The PA has been arresting dozens of alleged participants in a violent pro-bin Laden demonstration that took place in Gaza City on Monday, and during which several protesters were killed by his own security forces. (Most indications are that three Palestinians, including a 13-year-old were killed, although some reports have put the death toll as high as six; Hamas leaders are urging Mr Arafat to dismiss his Gaza police chief, Mr Ghazi Jabali.) The PA was also said by Israeli officials yesterday to have requested supplies from Israel of tear-gas, rubber bullets and other non-lethal means for dispersing further such demonstrations - a request that Israel was said to have turned down, and that PA officials insisted had never been made.
Mr Arafat has been at pains to suppress any displays of backing for bin Laden - and thus to win approval from the Bush Administration. and, presumably, diplomatic gains in future U.S.-brokered negotiations with Israel. Mr Saeb Erekat, the senior Palestinian negotiator, insisted yesterday the Palestinian public mood was genuinely supportive of the US-led coalition. "You saw one million Palestinian kids standing up to denounce the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington," he said. But the enthusiasm at Monday's demonstration, and in several protests including an attack on a PA police station in Gaza's Nuseirat refugee camp yesterday, indicated this is far from universal.
Citing the "strong anger against the Palestinian Authority" because of its handling of Monday's protests and its efforts to enforce an intifada ceasefire with Israel, Hamas's spokesman in Gaza, Mahmoud Zahar, said yesterday "the majority of people are not accepting the [PA's] policies nowadays". Recent opinion polls indicate Hamas is now barely less popular than Mr Arafat's own mainstream Fatah faction of the PLO, and that more Palestinians identify with the Hamas goal of eliminating Israel.