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Palestine, like Israel, has both a president and a prime minister.

Mahmoud Abbas was elected President of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) on January 9, 2005, and took office on January 15, 2005. The election is considered to have been free and fair, though polls show that another Fatah leader, Marwan Barghouti, would have won a decisive victory over Abbas, had Barghouti not been one of the nearly 10,000 Palestinians arbitrarily imprisoned by Israel.

Ismail Haniyeh (or Haniya) became Prime Minister as a result of Hamas' victory in the Palestinian legislative election of January 25, 2006. He was sworn in as Prime Minister on March 29, 2006. All international monitors confirm that the election was free and fair.

But because Hamas is considered a terrorist organization by Israel and the West, severe sanctions were imposed that denied Palestine access even to its own funds.

In an effort to end the West's punitive measures against Palestine for their election of Hamas, Haniyeh resigned on February 15, 2007 so that a new Hamas/Fatah unity government could be formed. He was sworn in again on March 18, 2007.

This compromise did not satisfy Israel or the United States. Ensuing military clashes between Hamas and Fatah were largely the consequence of the interference of the United States, which was arming Fatah to defeat the legally elected legislature. As a result of the conflict, Hamas gained de facto control over Gaza, and Fatah over the West Bank.

President Abbas unilaterally "dismissed" Haniyeh from office on June 14, 2007. The Palestinian Legislative Council does not consider Abbas' action to be legal and continues to recognize Haniyeh.

Hamas is a terrorist organization that refuses to recognize Israel ?

Israel and the US delegitimize Hamas by claming that it refuses to recognize Israel, and refuses to renounce violence.

As for its refusal to recognize Israel :
1. Hamas has repeatedly offered a 'permanent peace' with Israel, which is precisely the relationship the US has with Taiwan (the US refuses to recognize Taiwan).
2. More importantly, what does it mean to recognize Israel? Israel refuses to define what "Israel" means. What would Hamas be recognizing? Israel 1948? Israel 1967? Israel 2007? Israel 2015?
3. Israel refuses to recognize Palestine. It is a perversion of justice to insist that an occupied country should recognize its occupier before the occupier recognizes the country it is illegally occupying.
4. Recognition of Israel is about the only 'bargaining chip' Palestine has. After Israel ends its occupation, and conforms to international law and conventions, Palestinian recognition of Israel will become a fair question.

As for its refusal to renounce violence :
All countries have, by international law, the right to protect themselves. Violence by Hamas directed against civilians is illegal and should be condemned, but that against occupying forces is legal. In contrast, Israel's violence against Palestine -- even if "collateral" -- is indefensible since it is the result of enforcing illegal colonization. Further, independent observers have repeatedly documented that the Israeli military specifically targets Palestinian civilians in what can only be called state terrorism.

This takes many forms: the deliberate shooting of non-threatening civilians, particularly children; the demolition of houses and other vital infrastructure; the impeding of medical care through arbitrary 'check-points'; collateral harassment through sonic booms and other collective punishment; the illegal detention, and often torture, of Palestinian civilians (currently about 10,000); the deliberate starvation of the people through the withholding of Palestine's tax revenues and the strangling of its economy, and the kidnapping and imprisonment many members of the Palestinian government.

Hamas unilaterally initiated a cease-fire, which it honored for over a year, despite Israel's failure to reciprocate.

Thus, while any violence by Hamas against Israeli civilians must be unequivocally condemned, the mantra of 'renouncing violence' needs, rather, to be addressed to Israel.

Hamas has taken Gaza in a military coup ?

The United States publically claims to want to spread 'democracy' through the world. In truth, it has continually sabotaged democracies whose will does not serve the United States' corporate/strategic interests, and bolstered murderous dictatorships that do. Its behavior regarding Palestine continues this tradition.

Hamas was elected in early 2006 in a free and fair election. Most voters chose Hamas because of their perception that Fatah, which was then in power, was plagued by corruption, and was not doing enough to protect them, both in the short term (the daily violence of the Israeli Occupation Force) and the long term (negotiating for statehood and its related issues). Though irrelevant to actual question of democracy, polls and interviews repeatedly revealed that the fanaticism stressed by the Western press was not the reason Hamas won the elections. Rather, Hamas won despite that image.

Since Hamas' election, Israel and the West have prevented Palestine from getting its tax income. This money is not charity, but rather the Palestinian's own rightful revenue.

International aid has also been denied -- this aid necessary to help counter the economic disaster inflicted by the Occupation and its related destruction of what had prior to 1948 been a self-sufficient economy.

As a result, Gaza, already a virtual concentration camp, has endured starvation conditions.

In an attempt to end the starving of Gaza, Hamas submitted to third-party negotiations to compromise its share of power with Fatah. There was no reason why Hamas needed to forfeit its legally won share of power, but it agreed to do so to end the impasse. Yet this overture was ignored by Israel and the West.

Now the accumulated money will be released, but to President Abbas and Fatah in the West Bank, and "relief aid" via the UN and NGOs in Gaza. President Abbas has named a new Prime Minister, an action he has no legal power to do. Meanwhile Hamas' rule in Gaza is considered a "coup" or "occupation" even though it is the legally elected government for all Palestine.

Suggested Reading :

"Must read" : Decoding the media's Palestinian "civil war"
(Ben White, The Electronic Intifada)

"How do we deal with a coup d'état by an elected government?"
(Robert Fisk, The Independent)

Whose Coup, Exactly?
(Virginia Tilley, The Electronic Intifada)

Towards a Geography of Peace: Whither Gaza?
(Ilan Pappé, The Electronic Intifada)

What Amira Hass said about Gaza (from Ha'aretz)

The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are killing each other. They are behaving as expected at the end of the extended experiment called "what happens when you imprison 1.3 million human beings in an enclosed space like battery hens."

These are the steps in the experiment: Imprison (since 1991); remove the prisoners' usual means of livelihood; seal off all outlets to the outside world, nearly hermetically; destroy existing means of livelihood by preventing the entry of raw materials and the marketing of goods and produce; prevent the regular entry of medicines and hospital supplies; do not bring in fresh food for weeks on end; prevent, for years, the entry of relatives, professionals, friends and others, and allow thousands of people - the sick, heads of families, professionals, children - to be stuck for weeks at the locked gates of the Gaza Strip's only entry/exit.

Steal hundreds of millions of dollars (customs and tax revenues collected by Israel that belong to the Palestinian treasury), so as to force the nonpayment of the already low salaries of most government employees for months; present the firing of homemade Qassam rockets as a strategic threat that can only be stopped by harming women, children and the old; fire on crowded residential neighborhoods from the air and the ground; destroy orchards, groves and fields.

Dispatch planes to frighten the population with sonic booms; destroy the new power plant and force the residents of the closed-off Strip to live without electricity for most of the day for a period of four months, which will most likely turn into a full year - in other words, a year without refrigeration, electric fans, television, lights to study and read by; force them to get by without a regular supply of water, which is dependent on the electricity supply.

It is the good old Israeli experiment called "put them into a pressure cooker and see what happens," and this is one of the reasons why this is not an internal Palestinian matter.

The success of the experiment can be seen in the miasma of desperation that hangs over the Gaza Strip, and in the clan feuding that erupts almost daily there, even more than in the battles between Fatah and Hamas militants. One can only wonder that the feuding is not more frequent, and that some bonds of internal solidarity have been maintained, which saves people from hunger.