KEY POINTS:
Carrying the stamp of Preventative Security, and marked "highly secret", the single dirty document lying on the ground instructed the reader to assemble information on one Abdel Rahman Salah Shadeh Karnua. But it was a rarity among the papers scattered among the detritus in the yard.
Most of
the secret files of the most hated - by Hamas - Palestinian security apparatus were carefully collated and spirited away by the victorious Islamic faction after the five-day civil war.
If there was a real sense of regime change at all in Gaza, it was at the Preventative Security headquarters, where the scorched window frames, the bullet-pocked walls, a burned-out truck, a dried bloodstain on the floor of one office, the twisted corrugated-iron roof of an outside lean-to all attested to the ferocity of Thursday's fighting.
Three years ago, Raed Ali, now 26, was one of the balaclava-masked, grenade-launcher-carrying Hamas militants who fought Israeli forces in the streets of the Zeitoun district of Gaza City. Yesterday, this slight, bearded man, an AK-47 over his shoulder, a mobile phone in the pocket of his webbing, and wearing the crisp blue fatigues of a sergeant in the 3000-member Hamas executive force, was proud to show us round what he saw as the liberated cells of what since Yasser Arafat's time had been the main Fatah-run centre for interrogating political detainees.
It is still hard to disinter the accounts both sides have of executions during the battle, each denied by the other. Sergeant Ali said they found the bodies of five men executed by Fatah security men, one of whom Hamas had identified as their own Issam al Juja.
Fatah says at least seven of its men were executed in cold blood in the street outside the building after the battle. While he refused to accept this, Mr Ali pointed to the graffiti on the cell walls, one of which showed a drawing of a man - presumably the artist - behind bars with the caption, "Oh God, I swear this is injustice." In the bubble coming from his mouth was a small bottle, of the sort Mr Ali claimed had been inserted in prisoners' rectums as a torture.
"All the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip hated Preventative Security," Mr Ali declared, adding of the outcome of a conflict which cost upwards of 90 lives last week: "Of course we are very happy now, because victory has been achieved for the security of the citizens of Gaza."
No, he said, the battle had not been against Fatah as such but against the "coup team" led by security chiefs Mohammed Dahlan and Rashid Abu Shbak. "We all want to achieve national unity," he insisted, on message.
But you needed to see the green flag of Hamas flying over this former Fatah bastion to appreciate the shift in internal control, because otherwise Gaza City was pretty much Gaza City yesterday; it bore little sign so far of overnight transformation into the fundamentalist Islamic Hamastan of popular imagination.
It's true with the Fatah-dominated civil police having been ordered from Ramallah to stay at home - ironically in return for what they have now been promised, at last, be a proper salary - the traffic was instead being directed with variable competence by young volunteers in green baseball caps and phosphorescent green jerkins carrying the Hamas insignia.
One of the ugliest immediate hangovers of the conflict remains unresolved. Up to 150 Palestinians, including women and children in the families of lower-ranking Fatah officials who were not included on the VIP list admitted at the end of last week to Israel and on to the West Bank, remained trapped at the Erez crossing.
Israeli tanks entered the crossing to protect ambulances retrieving - for treatment in Israeli hospitals - half a dozen people wounded after Monday's gunbattle between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces at the crossing.
At the supermarket in Palestine St, a middle-class woman who would only give her name as Mona, a member of Gaza's tiny Palestinian Christian minority, was stocking up against food shortages, now that Gaza faced being even more of a - her words - "big prison" than before.
She also said she was afraid that Hamas internal control would now mean harassment of those who, like her, did not cover their heads. No, she had not been threatened, neither in the year the Hamas Cabinet had been in office, nor in the past few days. But she was fearful, despite denials by Hamas, that it would happen soon.
Outside Shifa Hospital, where heavy gunbattles last week cleared the surrounding streets, taxi driver Muhialdin Melahas, 45, and the man who allots tickets to passengers as the taxis queue up, Nidal Habib, 37, spoke of their anxieties about being caught between Hamas control in Gaza and an administration in Ramallah that had disowned it.
"We need security and a living to feed our families," said Mr Melahas. "But the world will not recognise this government [in Gaza]. They say it is a terrorist organisation. I don't really see how it can last."
Both men remained convinced that a fresh Fatah-Hamas deal was the only solution.
- INDEPENDENT
