Mick Hartley

An interview with Hamas co-founder Mahmoud Zahar, plus some voices on the Gaza street (via Solomonia):

The fierce co-founder of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, a surgeon by training, spent 20 minutes after a recent interview with CBC News insisting that evolution is false.

After all, said Zahar, a donkey can eat shrubbery and survive, but a human cannot.

"So, a donkey is more evolved than a human? No," scoffs Zahar, seemingly satisfied that he has demonstrated the absurdity of Charles Darwin's theory….

That should shut Richard Dawkins up.

Ever since its bloody takeover of Gaza in June 2007, Hamas has seemed to be an existential threat to Israel, ruling a new, Islamic state with its sword at the throat of the Jews. But on the dusty, chaotic streets of Gaza, after more than a year of isolation under Hamas rule, popular support seems thin.

CBC News recently entered what is, theoretically, a closed military area in the grim Shejaiya section of Gaza City. This was the stronghold of the Hilles clan, one of Gaza's well-armed mafias, and it was recently the scene of the worst violence in Gaza since the Hamas takeover.

All the dead were Palestinian. Hamas used the minaret of the local mosque as a firebase in a bloody assault on the Hilles clan, many of whom are allied with the secular Fatah movement.

Eleven Hilles men were killed. Dozens of others ran for the border — the Israeli border. In a humiliating scene, wounded and terrified Hilles clansmen begged the Israelis to save them from Hamas. They were strip-searched, interrogated and treated in Israeli hospitals before being shipped to a refuge in the sweltering West Bank town of Jericho.

From his hospital bed in Ashkelon in Israel, Shadi Hilles said he had no choice but to flee. "If we try to go back to Gaza, they will hunt us. They will murder us."

The message of this bloodbath was clear: Hamas is tightening its grip on Gaza and rivals had better be silent.

These events were mentioned in Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor's article in CiF last week, where he argued that Hamas had "used the recent internal violence in Gaza to extinguish the final flames of resistance to its rule". But maybe not:

In Gaza City's market square, a crowd gathers as people pour out their own anger about the siege to the CBC crew. Essentials are in short supply, they say.

"We have no jobs, no fuel," says one man, "and the borders are closed."

A woman says: "Everything is expensive, we can't get medicines."

"We live in a prison," the woman's friend adds. "If we want to criticize, it's forbidden."

But she throws caution to the winds, her voice rising as she condemns the Hamas crackdown on its rivals in Fatah. "It's our neighbours who are oppressing us."

Nobody disagrees.

Even more striking is that people dare to speak openly of something that is heresy to Hamas — peace with Israel. Most adult Gazans can remember when it was possible to make a living by working in construction or agricultural jobs in Israel. No more.

A man waits his turn to speak and then lets out his rage.

"We want them to find an agreement with Israel so we can go and work in Israel," he says. "Everyone here wants to go to Israel to find a job. We want to live! We want to live!"