Fatah, Hamas in Torture Allegations

[Lithos]

Gaza, Ramallah] Muhammad, 35, former chief of the Fatah district office in the Jabalya refugee camp, lives in a house made of concrete walls with asbestos roofing in the northern Gaza camp, which is today home to about 100,000 people.

Like many young Fatah men, Muhammad was arrested by Tanfiziyya, the Hamas security forces policing Gaza, a few days after Hamas routed its longstanding rival Fatah faction and took control of the coastal enclave last June. For a few weeks he was jailed at the notorious Saraya prison in central Gaza.

“They threw me into a room and every night from 11.30 to 3.30 in the morning, they came in every 15 minutes and beat me with sticks, fists, kicks and a black leather crop," says Muhammad.

...

http://www.themedialine.org/news/news_detail.asp?NewsID=20872

[al bupp]

1. There's a Vanity Fair article on this in this month's issue

The Gaza Bombshell

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.

To hear an interview with David Rose and to see documents he uncovered, click here.
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.”

More at: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804

[Tom Joad]

2. fatah, hamas, Israel and the US... finally something in common!