Hamas spokesmen accuse Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah leader and internationally recognised head of the rump government known as the Palestinian Authority (PA), of colluding with Israel’s onslaught. Hamas says that since his term as president has expired he should step down. Some mutter that Fatah agents even gave intelligence to enable Israel to assassinate several top Hamas officials. According to some reports, Hamas has already killed suspected Fatah “collaborators” in Gaza.

The war’s longer-term impact on Palestinian opinion is hard to assess. Opinion polls before the fighting had shown a steady erosion of support for the Islamists, even in Gaza, where the PA still pays state salaries. A wartime surge in emotional identification with Hamas is likely to fade, but this may not boost Mr Abbas, whose efforts to coax Israel into peace, while lauded in the West, have produced few gains on the ground. The Fatah leader provoked outrage when he blamed Hamas for stupidly provoking Israel’s attack, then told police to stamp out protests in the West Bank, which Fatah still controls. “He is now a political corpse,” says one independent Palestinian analyst, suggesting that younger Fatah activists, who have long bridled at the group’s domination by an aid-padded coterie of Mr Abbas’s loyalists, may now try not only to oust them but to renounce peace talks with Israel.

The weakening of the Fatah-run PA has prompted some in both parties to call yet again for a unity government and for early elections to give a new government a more legitimate mandate. But while harder-line members of Hamas say the heroism of their self-declared “victory” in Gaza is legitimacy enough, Fatah’s older guard seems determined to cling to its historic dominance of the Palestinian national movement. Hamas also demands the release of scores of its members held by Mr Abbas’s police in the West Bank, while Fatah insists on keeping control of foreign affairs, including peace dealings with Israel.

... contd.