By Zaki Chehab
On the brink of civil war, alarm bells ricocheted through the tiny and beleaguered Gaza Strip. Last Thursday, senior Hamas leader Dr. Nazar Rayyan announced that his immediate ambitions were to hold Friday prayers at the beach-side Palestinian Authority headquarters of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas -- and convert the city’s Fatah-run Palestinian police headquarters into a Grand Mosque. This provocative statement awakened latent fears that Gaza was about to become a mini Taliban-style Islamic state, something Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was critical of when I interviewed him in the presence of his then adviser, Ismail Hanieh, the newly-deposed Hamas Prime Minister, two years before Yassin’s assassination.
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