Scoop Link: The Gaza Bombshell
By David Rose
Vanity Fair
April 2008 Issue
After failing to anticipate Hamas's victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet
another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With
confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current US officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush,
Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman
Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.
"A Dirty War"
The Al Deira Hotel, in Gaza City, is a haven of calm in a land beset by poverty, fear, and violence. In the middle of
December 2007, I sit in the hotel's airy restaurant, its windows open to the Mediterranean, and listen to a slight,
bearded man named Mazen Asad abu Dan describe the suffering he endured 11 months before at the hands of his fellow
Palestinians. Abu Dan, 28, is a member of Hamas, the Iranian-backed Islamist organization that has been designated a
terrorist group by the United States, but I have a good reason for taking him at his word: I've seen the video.
It shows abu Dan kneeling, his hands bound behind his back, and screaming as his captors pummel him with a black iron
rod. "I lost all the skin on my back from the beatings," he says. "Instead of medicine, they poured perfume on my
wounds. It felt as if they had taken a sword to my injuries."
On January 26, 2007, abu Dan, a student at the Islamic University of Gaza, had gone to a local cemetery with his father
and five others to erect a headstone for his grandmother. When they arrived, however, they found themselves surrounded
by 30 armed men from Hamas's rival, Fatah, the party of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. "They took us to a house in
north Gaza," abu Dan says. "They covered our eyes and took us to a room on the sixth floor."
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