Late last year her son Mahmoud was murdered. She grips a framed photo of his corpse, punctured with dozens of tiny red pinpricks like mosquito bites. “Sixty-three bullets,” she calmly explains. But when talk turns to the recent ceasefire brokered between Palestinian factions in Mecca, her equanimity fades. “We’re not part of this deal!” she cries. “After they killed our son?” She blames 18 members of the Islamist group Hamas for the shooting. “First we’ll kill the leader,” she says. “Then we’ll kill the other 17.”
That might seem like the empty threat of a heartbroken mother. After all, Palestinian leaders hoped that the low-grade civil war that has killed about 100 Gazans and wounded 300 more since the beginning of the year was coming to an end. At an emergency summit meeting in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, two weeks ago, Hamas and Fatah agreed to share power in a new “unity government,” and the Islamists pledged to “respect” past peace deals with Israel. But similar accords have collapsed in the past. Already politicians are squabbling over the thorny issues of who will control Gaza’s security forces and key cabinet ministries in any new government.
Even if the two parties manage to agree, the emotionally charged family rivalries could torpedo the deal. In tight-knit Gaza, feuds between the territory’s roughly 100 large clans are something of a local sport, even in times of relative peace. Taxi drivers keep the tallies like box scores. Some of the large households line up behind Fatah; others, Hamas. But family ties often trump party affiliation. And because they are intensely personal, the clan wars are even harder to control than sectarian infighting. “You can give orders to a faction,” says a senior Palestinian intelligence officer, who didn’t want to be identified because of the secretive nature of his work. But “the most important thing is how we deal with the families.”
Money might help. NEWSWEEK has learned that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas plans to convene a committee of party officials and family leaders in the coming days to try to resolve some of the lingering feuds. The meetings will focus on the payment of diehs –one-time cash handouts to each of the victims’ families. The intelligence officer believes the whole matter could be settled with $30 million; he’s hoping the Saudis will pick up the tab. “If they want it to succeed, they’ll have to pay,” he insists. Still, he concedes, for many of the families “money’s not the problem.”
He might have been speaking of the Doqmosh family’s next-door neighbors, the al-Dires, who have come up with a solution of their own. Each month, the clan’s roughly 1,000 men contribute $2 to a communal fund they call the “family box.” They use it partly to buy their own supply of weapons. Ibrahim al-Dire, the household’s wiry patriarch, clutches a cigarette in one hand and a fistful of rocket-propelled grenades in the other. In January, he says, three family members were assassinated in the street outside his home. He blames the Doqmoshes, and won’t rest, deal or no deal among Palestinian leaders, until he has vengeance. “We know their names,” says another family member, 33-year-old Munther al-Dire. “If we find them in the street, we’ll kill them.”
It won’t end there, of course. The Doqmosh family has amassed an arsenal of its own. Over the past year, they have become one of the most powerful forces in Gaza. Lately they tend to be allied with Fatah, but they’re also something of a free radical. One member says the clan has 3,000 men “above the age of 16” at its disposal. Another of its elders, Momtaz Doqmosh (his first name translates as “excellent”) commands a prominent splinter group of Gaza’s Popular Resistance Committees. Munther al-Dire insists he’s not intimidated. “We’ll deal with this thing between the families,” he says. “After we take revenge, maybe we’ll be friends again.” If only revenge were so tidy.
