Palestinian split rattles region

Regional leaders have two recent examples in which turning gunmen into debaters has not worked. In Lebanon, some hoped that Hizbullah could be reshaped into political players, while in Gaza, Hamas insisted on being both a political party and a military group.

"The last thing the region's leaders wanted to see was a Hamas-led government, and that's the main concern for those countries that have moderate Islamist parties," Azzam adds.

"An Islamic political party has, through its militants, been able to set up an independent authority and that's always worrying to those neighboring states that want to quell their own Islamist factions and militants," she says.

The so-called Quartet, a four-party Middle East peacemaking group that includes the US, the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia, decided after the election of Hamas early last year that it would not deal with the Islamic organization unless it recognized previous agreements, forswore violence, and agreed to recognize Israel. The Hamas charter, which calls for Israel's destruction, made that unlikely.

The changing reality of the region is that people interested in voting for Islamic parties are motivated by a variety of reasons. But the region's longstanding regimes have not found a formula to cope with this fact, meet demands to democratize, and at the same time, ensure their stability and survival.

"These political parties have a constituency; they have support within their societies. They have chosen where they have chosen, and the choice was not respected," Azzam says. "If you make life as difficult for them as possible, it delegitimizes those who say, 'we can choose a democratic path.' What you're going to see is a radicalization because they'll say, the democratic route is being denied us," she says.

Yesterday in Ramallah, where Fatah still maintains control, Abbas swore in a new cabinet. He indicated that the new government, and its disassociation from Hamas, would pave the way to the return of foreign aid for the Palestinian economy.

Leading moderate Salam Fayyad, an ex-World Bank official who is now prime minister and finance minister, told Palestinians that the government would try to restore order. "Security of the citizen is the priority on the basis of the sovereignty of the law," he said in a televised address. Hamas, using the language much of the world has used to describe its action against Fatah in Gaza last week, said that Abbas's steps amounted to a coup.

In the lobby of Ramallah's Grand Park Hotel, a popular place for political gatherings, dozens of Fatah officials embraced each other as they were reunited since fleeing Gaza in fear of arrest and execution. They spoke by cellphone with worried family members who were forced to remain behind in Gaza because they couldn't get Israeli security authorization to leave.

Hundreds of Palestinian Authority (PA) members were given special permission by the Israeli army to cross over from Gaza to the West Bank. On Saturday, dozens of Gazans were caught just outside the Israeli gate of the crossing terminal.

Ashraf Eid al-Ajrami, a journalist who was appointed minister of prisoner affairs in the emergency government, says that one of its goals was to lift the aid boycott of the PA, which has been in place since Hamas took power in March 2006.

At the same time, Mr. Ajani says the government will try to topple Hamas in Gaza by encouraging an international political siege.

"We will make sure they are besieged internally, locally, and regionally," he says. "What we will try to do is to strip away the legitimacy of the Hamas entity. We want to alienate the people from Hamas."

• Correspondent Joshua Mitnick contributed to this report from Ramallah.

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