The enemy within: life under Hamas

[oberliner]

He seemed to come from nowhere, walking at a fast pace across the junction where we were parked in the heart of the crowded refugee camp. Alerted to the registration number of our taxi, he opened a back door and slipped into the rear seat. "Let's get out of here," he said. "There are eyes everywhere."

This sounds melodramatic, but it may also be understandable. A militant since the beginning of the second intifada, he is wanted by Israel, and therefore identifiable from an overhead drone, like the one which, three days after we spoke, destroyed a Subaru, killing its occupants, two brothers from the Army of Islam, the extremist Islamist organisation that kidnapped the BBC correspondent Alan Johnston in 2007.

But this good-looking Palestinian in his thirties says it is not the Israeli military that has made him nervous about talking to us. Rather it's the internal security force of Hamas, whose plain-clothes operatives arrested him this year while he was leading a group of fighters intending to mount what he will only delicately describe as a military "operation" against Israel. Before speaking to us, he extracted a promise not to use his name or identify his faction, the month he was detained, or even the area of Gaza he was arrested in, or the exact nature of the "operation" he'd been part of.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-enemy-within-life-under-hamas-2145650.html