After Hamas victory, the priority in Gaza is 'food and peace'

Bearing the stamp of Preventative Security, and marked "Highly Secret", the single dirty document 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 had been carefully collated and spirited away by the victorious Islamic faction after what had been the most decisive as well as the bloodiest engagement of the five-day civil war. Few of the hundreds more scattered documents were as tantalising, a salary slip here showing an officer's pay of 1800 shekels a month, a ripped and trodden-on photograph there of Rashid Abu Shbak, after Mohammed Dahlan, the Fatah security chief most demonised by Hamas's military wing.

If there was a real sense of regime change at all in Gaza yesterday it was here at the Preventative Security headquarters where the scorched window frames, the walls pockmarked by gunfire, a burnt-out pick-up truck, the large patch of dried blood on the rubbish-strewn floor of one office and the twisted corrugated iron roof of an outside lean-to all attested to the lethal ferocity of last Thursday's fighting.

Three years ago, Raed Ali, now 26 was one of the balaclava-clad, RPG-toting Hamas militants who fought Israeli forces in the streets of the Zeitoun district of Gaza City, when six Israeli soldiers were killed after their armoured personnel carrier was blown up. Yesterday, this slight, bearded man, a Kalashnikov slung on his shoulder, a mobile phone in the pocket of his webbing, and wearing the crisp new blue fatigues of a sergeant in the 3,000-strong Hamas Executive Force, was proud to show us round what he saw as the liberated prison cells of what since Yasser Arafat's time had been main Fatah-run centre for interrogating political detainees.

It is still hard to disinter the accounts both sides have of executions committed by the other during the battle, each denied by the other. Sgt Ali said they found the bodies of five men executed by Fatah security men before their defeat. Hamas has identified one of the dead as its own, Issam al Juja. Fatah says at least seven of its men were killed in cold blood in the street outside the building after the battle. While he refused to accept this, Sgt Ali pointed to the graffiti on the walls of the cells, one of which contained 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 Sgt Ali claimed had in previous times been inserted in prisoners' rectums as an instrument of torture.

"All the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip hated Preventative Security," Sergeant Ali said. Of the outcome of a conflict which cost upwards of 90 lives last week he added: "Of course, we are very happy now, because victory has been achieved for the security of the citizens of Gaza." He said the battle had not been against Fatah as such but against the "coup team" led by Mr Dahlan and Mr 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 - some - popular imagination. With the Fatah-dominated civil police force having been ordered from Ramallah to stay at home - ironically in return for what they have now been promised will, at last, be a proper salary - the traffic was instead being directed with variable competence by young volunteers wearing green baseball caps and bright green jerkins carrying the Hamas insignia.

But 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 the West Bank, remained trapped at the Erez crossing. Israeli tanks entered the crossing yesterday to protect ambulances retrieving - for treatment in Israeli hospitals - half a dozen people wounded after Monday's gun battle between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces at the crossing, where yesterday young male Palestinian looters were busy dismantling what was left of the tunnel that leads from the border to a now abandoned and largely destroyed Palestinian security post.

At the supermarket in Palestine Street, a middle-class woman who would give her name only 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 "big prison" than before, she said. She was afraid that Hamas internal control would now mean harrassment of those who, like her, did not cover their heads. No, she had not been threatened, neither in the year that the Hamas cabinet had been in office, not in the past few days. But she was fearful, despite denials by Hamas, that it would happen soon.

Few others seemed fearful of speaking their minds on the crisis. Neman Hussein, the supermarket manager, admitted that the panic buying because of the fear of a prolonged sealing of Gaza's borders was not repeated yesterday but still claimed that he would run out of some staples such as flour and powdered milk in a matter of days if his stocks were not replenished. "Only God knows what will happen," said Mr Hussein, who blames Fatah and Hamas equally for last week's savage infighting. "All we need is peace and food."

Outside Shifa hospital, where fierce gun battles last week cleared the surrounding streets, Muhialdin Melahas, 45, a taxi driver, and Nidal Habib, 37, who allots tickets to passengers as the taxis queue, 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."

Mr Habib said there were not yet serious shortages "but if this situation lasts for a couple of weeks there will be problems. And we are worried that the Israelis are going to attack us."

Both men remained convinced that a fresh Fatah-Hamas deal was the only solution. "We don't know what this new government in Ramallah is trying to do," said Mr Melahas.

Mr Habib added: "Abu Mazen [President Mahmoud Abbas] should come here or go on television and tell us. If we have just Hamas, Fatah will cause problems and if we have just Fatah, then Hamas will cause problems. But it needs to be an agreement at the roots where they both really agree on everything, not like Mecca [where the national unity government was brokered by Saudi Arabia in February]."

Last night, at least, that seemed a distant prospect.