ANALYSIS: Gaza Militants' adoption of guerilla warfare

This type of warfare, the militants believe, could provide them with the legitimacy that to some extent they lost, especially after the attacks at the Erez checkpoint which put a halt to the ever-thinning stream of Palestinian workers entering Israel.

This system also appears to have the advantage of being safer, since it is hard for Israel to discover the perpetrators in advance and prevent them from attacking. Whether or not it can be compared with the Hezbollah's tactics in Lebanon is a moot point. It was successfully used in Afghanistan against the Soviet forces, and is now being employed against the Americans in Iraq.

If indeed this is a new strategy, it was born out of the difficulty of "exporting" bombers to Israel and of the availability of the targets -settlers and soldiers in APCs - in proximity to the attackers. The success of three attacks in the last 10 days and their effect on the public will probably mean they will be expanded and possibly also copied in the West Bank.

The system strengthens the image of Hamas and Islamic Jihad since they are perceived as fighting against a regular army rather than civilians. That is why the two groups realized immediately that showing off body parts and making excessive demands for a prisoner swap would weaken their stance.

Hamas sources said that religious leaders had also tried to avoid comparison with the Al-Qaida supporters who beheaded an American civilian in Iraq. That is why the leadership of Hamas and Jihad in Damascus agreed relatively quickly to Egyptian mediation efforts, as well as those of Mohammed Dahlan, which formulated a compromise that was accepted last night by all sides, including Israel.

As a result, Israel can claim that it did not negotiate with the militant organizations, and the withdrawal from Zeitun can be seen as the completion of the Israeli mission since the soldiers' bodies will already be in Israeli hands.

According to Egyptian sources, Syria also participated in formulating the agreement. It is nevertheless too early to decide whether this means that Hamas and Jihad are joining forces politically. The Hamas leader in Damascus, Haled Mash'al, does not appear to accept his Jihad counterpart, Ramadan Abdallah Shalah, as an equal partner.

However, both Hamas and Islamic Jihad are aware that they are not the only groups active in the area, and that armed gangs that do not accept the hegemony of either of them have also built their own alternative pockets of power.

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/426841.html