A planned result ?

Mohammed Dahlan, seemingly politically unfazed by the recent events, said in a Reuters interview that Hamas "fell into a trap" laid by Israel when it took control of the Gaza Strip. There isn't any elaboration on how the trap was set, and certainly there isn't any indication of Dahlan's role or that of anyone else in particular.

Charles Levinson, at ConflictBlotter.com, who talked to a number of Fatah fighters in Gaza following their defeat, summed up his findings this way:

Fatah never fought. Gaza was essentially handed over to Hamas. Soldier after soldier said they felt betrayed and abandoned by their leadership. There was a seemingly willful lack of decision making by the senior most political leadership. Up and down the Gaza Strip from the first moments of fighting, the military leadership disintegrated while the political leadership remained eerily silent.

Levinson goes out of his way to point out there are any number of good reasons for the defeat from a military point of view, but certainly the Dahlan remark about the "trap" does correspond quite nicely with Levinson's observation that during the crutial time "the [Fatah] political leadership remained eerily silent."

If the Hamas victory was one "surprise", the second "surprise" wasn't long in coming, in the form of Abbas' immediate "firing" of Prime Minister Haniya, estblishment of an "emergency" government, and denunciation of Hamas as terrorist killers with the aim of setting up a takfiiri emirate. This is much more the language of Washington than that of Ramallah. Two back-to-back "surprises"...

Then there is the point about US policy. The US-authored "Action Plan" of February talked about the need to re-affirm Abbas and Fatah as the "center of gravity of the Palestinian leadership", via security, economic, and political means, so as to make sure that his international support didn't continue to decline as a result of the Mecca-accord on a unitary government with Hamas. None of the specific "action" points in the Action Plan came to fruition--not optimism respecting talks with Israel; not quick-fix economic development; not even Fatah control of security. So faced with that, it is reasonable to assume that the Washington-Israel-Fatah people had given some thought to an alternative that would promote the same ultimate end: ensuring international support for the Fatah leadership, and also promoting the same ultimate end of isolating Hamas economically, politically and with respect to security.

Logic suggests what happened could well have been the result of a deliberate policy choice. Dahlan in fact says it was that, when he says Hamas fell into an Israeli-laid trap. And the Levinson interviews with surviving Fatah fighters suggest they feel that way too.

And the "intelligence debacle" first reported, in alarmist tones, by the disinformation site DebkaFile? While subsequent remarks by Hamas people suggest there was in fact some intelligence leakage, it is also possible that in the overall picture, we can identify the particular disinformation-purpose served by the Debka scoop: To make the Fatah defeat look like something truly unexpected and not planned beforehand.