The Hamas repertory company
It seems that Hamas didn’t just switch off the lights when there was no need to do so—they made a theatrical production of it. Khaled Abu Toameh reports in the Jerusalem Post:
On at least two occasions this week, Hamas staged scenes of darkness as part of its campaign to end the political and economic sanctions against the Gaza Strip, Palestinian journalists said Wednesday. In the first case, journalists who were invited to cover the Hamas government meeting were surprised to see Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and his ministers sitting around a table with burning candles. In the second case on Tuesday, journalists noticed that Hamas legislators who were meeting in Gaza City also sat in front of burning candles. But some of the journalists noticed that there was actually no need for the candles because both meetings were being held in daylight. ‘They had closed the curtains in the rooms to create the impression that Hamas leaders were also suffering as a result of the power stoppage,’ one journalist told The Jerusalem Post. ‘It was obvious that the whole thing was staged.’From the staged ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah, to Hezbollah’s ‘fauxtographic’ staged Israeli ‘atrocities’ during the Lebanon war, to the staged candlelit theatrics in Gaza, there is clearly no end to the am dram talents of the Palestinians in acting out make-believe and presenting it as fact.
Maybe this is what Arafat actually meant by his ‘strategy of stages’. It certainly is a true theatre of war.