Exclusive: Palestinian Hamas takes over Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood, looms over Egyptian Delta

debkafile‘s Middle East sources disclose a signal victory in Hamas’ expansionist drive Friday, May 2, when its members scooped up 28 of the 50 seats of Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood Shura Council in a secret ballot.
Hamam Said, 64, a Palestinian Hamas operative from the West Bank town of Jenin, was elected the movement’s General Guide by a single vote. Until 2005, Said, a trusted follower of Damascus-based hard-line Hamas chief, Khaled Meshaal, was a leader of the Jordanian Sawailah crime gang, which doubles as an extremist Islamist militia.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II sent his secret services to prevent Hamas sweeping the Muslim Brotherhood, which like its Egyptian branch is banned, but they failed.
Jordanian and Israeli counter-terror officers say the Palestinian Hamas takeover of the kingdom’s largest movement is potentially more destabilizing in regional terms than its victory in the Palestinian Authority’s 2006 election. It the short term, it presents hazards to Jordan’s internal security and could create new flashpoints on the long Jordanian-Israeli frontier.
debkafile‘s counter-terror sources report several arrests by Egypt’s security forces in Cairo, the central Delta town of Tanta and El Arish, northern Sinai, of fundamentalists suspected of founding a joint Hamas-Muslim Brotherhood armed cell at Tanta, Egypt’s fifth largest city, 94 km north of Cairo. Among them was Dr. Abd al-Farmawi, a lecturer at Al Azhar University’s local branch.
This was the first Brotherhood bid in half a century to branch out into military activism with the help of Hamas’ military wing.
The election of a Palestinian leader from Jenin by Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood took place the day before several hundred American-trained Palestinian Authority security police were to be deployed in the same West Bank town.
The Olmert government agreed to their deployment to show US secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when she arrives Saturday, May 3, that Israel is meeting the Mahmoud Abbas-Salam Fayyad administration in Ramallah halfway.
Neither Israeli nor American leaders counted on Hamas’ move on Jordan, or took into account that the word of Hamam Said, the Hamas terrorist, will carry more weight in the terrorist stronghold of Jenin and the West Bank at large than the PA’s police force.