A resident of a refugee camp in Nablus, a member of Fatah, used to worship at a mosque that is identified with Hamas. As an employee of the public sector, he is one of tens of thousands of wage-earners who are not getting a regular salary. Once every few days, he would find a generous food package on his doorstep, put there by anonymous benefactors. Recently he began to worship at a different mosque, one not identified with Hamas. Since then there haven't been any packages. It's a story that is in accord with various impressions to the effect that Hamas finds indirect ways to reward its supporters.

These impressions are based on the legend that Hamas' charitable organizations have long created alternatives to the official welfare services. However, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is ahead of anyone else in providing emergency aid to Palestinian families: In the second quarter of 2006, 45.6 percent of the aid that was received by Palestinian families came from UNRWA. Second on the list is the Palestinian Welfare Ministry, with a 14.4 percent share of the aid. Various charitable organizations (many of them identified with Hamas) are responsible for no more than 3.5 percent of the aid. Nonetheless, this impression does have a connection to the general conduct of the Hamas leadership. Contrary to its pretension of being "the government of resistance to the occupation," in contrast to Fatah's "government of adaptation to the occupation," it already began to imitate its predecessor at the moment it established a government along the lines of the previous format, the one shaped by Yasser Arafat's self-deception that he was heading "a normal country."