Crackdown: Hamas policemen in Gaza City.

Crackdown: Hamas policemen in Gaza City. Photo: AFP

GAZA CITY: It is three weeks since his arrest, but Ismail Halou still has streaks of purple bruising on the soles of his feet. The 22-year-old was filling cars at his family's petrol station in Gaza City at 5pm on April 4 when a black jeep pulled into the forecourt and police stepped out to order him into the car. He was blindfolded and driven to the nearest police station.

"I could hear the screams of people being beaten in the rooms next to me," he recalled. "Two men held my legs down and tied them together on a wooden board then they beat the soles of my feet with a plastic rod. They beat me for at least five minutes. I was crying and screaming with agony. It was the worst pain I've ever felt."

Young people should be concerned with their education and what Israel is doing to us, rather than concentrating on the outside world and pop star haircuts. 

Ihab al-Ghusain, Hamas spokesman

After the beating, officers set to work shaving off the one-inch fin of gelled hair that was the cause of his arrest.

"At no point did they tell me why they had arrested me," Mr Halou said. "I found out from neighbours when I got home it was my haircut." He could not walk for three days after his release.

Police in Gaza, the Palestinian coastal enclave run by the Islamist faction Hamas since 2007, have arrested at least 41 men on charges of immodesty this month, some because their haircuts were deemed culturally inappropriate, others because their trousers were too low-slung or too fitted. Most were beaten, all had their heads forcibly shaved.

Rajou Hayek, 33, was arrested while pushing his father in a wheelchair to a health clinic in Gaza City. At the police station, where he suffered a beating before also having his head shaved, he saw what he describes as a hill of hair.

"It was humiliating. This policy is nothing to do with jeans or hairstyles. Hamas is just trying to make Gaza afraid of them," Mr Hayek said.

Ihab al-Ghusain, a spokesman for Hamas in Gaza, is critical of the police's violent methods but defends their message. "Young people should be concerned with their education and what Israel is doing to us, rather than concentrating on the outside world and pop star haircuts," he said.

Hamas security forces routinely use brutal tactics against political opponents in Gaza, but a violently enforced public modesty campaign is new. It has shocked a community hardened to conflict and poverty. Some Gazans are terrified that Hamas is driving them towards unapologetic, militant, Islamic fundamentalism.

In March, the United Nations issued a statement cancelling their annual Gaza marathon because Hamas had forbidden women from running alongside men, a practice it had allowed for the previous five years. This month a new law was introduced forbidding girls and boys over the age of nine from being educated alongside, or taught by anyone of, the opposite sex.

"There is no question that Gaza is more 'Islamicised' now than it has been at any point since Hamas took power and it is getting worse," said Samar Zakout, the deputy director of the Al Mezan human rights organisation in Gaza.

"To the international community, the Hamas leadership say they respect human rights. But at home they are struggling to convince their members they are protectors of traditional values."

The police's new tactics appear linked to challenges to the leadership of Hamas from more religiously conservative groups, and to divisions within the movement. On April 6, dozens of mothers protested in Rafah, demanding the release of their Salafist sons who were arrested by Hamas for firing rockets into Israel. Three days earlier, a supermarket in Jabalia refugee camp was the target of a Salafist bomb attack in protest at Western influence on Palestinian society.

Gaza's extremists and Hamas hardliners regard Khaled Meshaal, the recently re-elected leader of the Hamas politburo, as an Israeli collaborator.

In February last year, he enraged Hamas hardliners by signing the Doha Agreement – a deal under which Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah leader and president of the Palestinian Authority, would head a reconciled Palestinian government. He has also agreed to a Palestinian state within 1967 borders and was instrumental in brokering a truce to resolve last November's conflict with Israel.

Until reconciliation is achieved, the exiled Mr Meshaal's rivals remain in day-to-day control in Gaza and can undermine his efforts towards moderacy on the world stage by embracing fundamentalism at home. A population already battered by conflict with Israel and a six-year blockade will be squeezed even further.

Ismail Halou fears this future: "Hamas is getting stricter and stricter. We are already under so much pressure, there are so many troubles, and now it's our jeans and our hairstyles? For me, this is too much."

Telegraph, London