Israeli security forced a reluctant Palestine Authority to take action against both Hamas and the smaller, more radical Islamic Jihad by tracing the five Palestinian suicide bombers who killed 20 Israelis in two recent attacks in Jerusalem. Until the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, announced last Wednesday the breakthrough in the investigations of the two bombings, the Palestinian police seemed content to round up "the usual suspects", detaining half and releasing half.
But once the Israelis offered proof that the bombers did not come from abroad, as Hamas had led the authority to believe, the Palestinian police and security forces stepped up their campaign of arrests, detaining 20 suspects in Gaza and 80 in the West Bank, and began to tackle what the Israelis call the "terrorist infrastructure".
So far the authority has closed 15 Hamas-funded and Hamas-run charitable institutions in Gaza, including a girls' school, a nursery, an athletic association and a youth club, as well as a television station in the northern West Bank town of Nablus which broadcast two hours of Qu'ran readings daily.
According to an authoritative source in the West Bank: "None of these institutions are linked to the Izzedin al-Qassam [the military wing of Hamas] cell in Azira Shamaliya . . . none are political in nature, none were closed under Israeli rule. In fact the closures are not directed at the bombers, but are appeasement of the Israelis and the Americans.
"They will hurt the people who benefit from these institutions and are certain to cause inter-Palestinian tensions, particularly since the authority began doing this on the very day Netanyahu announced that he was going to build more houses for settlers in Efrat."
The Palestinians rely on many of these institutions to provide them with financial aid and services which the authority itself cannot offer. Thus the authority is not in any position to dismantle the Hamas "infrastructure" of clinics, welfare offices, mosques, schools and a university. Such action would punish the poorest Palestinians, the source said.
According to a recent UN-sponsored report, the Palestinian standard of living fell by 43 per cent in the last 10 years, by more than 20 per cent since 1992. A third of Palestinians have a per-capita income of less than $900 a year and 14 per cent have less than $500 a year as compared with a poverty level of $3,800 in Israel. Unemployment in the West Bank stood at 44 per cent, 60 per cent in Gaza.
Since the first Oslo accord was signed four years ago the Palestinian population has grown by 26 per cent, due to natural increase and the return of exiles. Over this period, Israel imposed 350 days of "closure" on the Palestinian areas at a cost to the population of $9 million a day.
This being the situation, any attempt by the authority to close down the Hamas "infrastructure" as a whole would almost certainly be met with violent popular resistance.