Can U.S. aid Palestinians while freezing out Hamas?

washington | With the prospect looming of a terrorist-ruled enclave on Israel's doorstep, the Bush administration is weighing how to isolate the terrorists — without hurting the Palestinians who voted them into power.

Administration officials are pushing hard against proposed congressional legislation, strongly favored by AIPAC, that would profoundly change the way the United States assists the Palestinians.

Aid questions were brought to the fore when Hamas, labeled a terrorist group by Israel and the United States, won a surprise landslide victory in Jan. 25 Palestinian legislative elections. The group has yet to assume power.

The officials say a humanitarian crisis is likely once the aid flow stops. A World Bank report published March 15 envisions 47 percent unemployment and 74 percent poverty in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by 2008 if aid restrictions described in the legislation are imposed.

Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. secretary of state, said the United States would forestall such a scenario.

"We're committed to the well-being of the Palestinian people," she said last week in Indonesia, where she was on a state visit. "We will continue humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people, to Palestinian refugees, to food assistance where it's needed, to the health and well-being of Palestinian children and families."

The legislation also could cripple attempts to maintain the current lull in violence, officials said.

In testimony March 15 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, the U.S. security envoy to the Palestinians, pleaded with senators not to tie his hands.

"The less restrictive that the legislature can be on our activities, the more flexibility it will give me as a military man to deal with situations that are inevitably very chaotic and unexpected," Dayton said.

Proposed legislation in both houses of Congress would ban assistance not just to Hamas, but to anyone associated with a Palestinian Authority run by Hamas. Furthermore, it would set unprecedented markers for the Palestinian Authority's return to the United States' good graces, no matter who's in charge in Ramallah.

Some have advocated maintaining aid but channeling it through relative moderates in the Palestinian Authority, such as current President Mahmoud Abbas, who is from the Fatah Party.

Backers of the House bill in Congress and in the pro-Israel community are concerned that such an approach would only bolster Hamas by freeing it from the business of government and allowing the terrorists to focus on arming. It also would undercut the intention of the sanctions, which is to show the Palestinians the impact of having a government run by a terrorist group.

Still, some senators worried that abandoning the Palestinian Authority could have dire consequences.

"A diminishment of aid from the West could further radicalize the Palestinian people or expand the influence of Iran and Syria," considered by the United States to be rogue states, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said in prepared remarks.

Proponents of the bills say they provide for humanitarian aid, but aid providers say the exceptions the president would have to seek from Congress would crimp such assistance.

James Wolfensohn, the former World Bank president who is now the envoy for the diplomatic Quartet — the grouping of the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia that is guiding the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — said the legislation would hamper efforts to circumvent Hamas.

Additionally, aid officials say the Palestinian Authority cannot be divorced from the delivery of assistance.

"The P.A. delivers the vast bulk of public services," Wolfensohn's World Bank report said. "It would be difficult to ramp up emergency/humanitarian assistance levels quickly if humanitarian flows required new verification procedures."

Wolfensohn said donor nations needed to come up with an alternate structure to the Palestinian Authority. That might not be possible in the short time — as little as days — before Hamas takes power.

"The notion of trying to re-establish a framework that deals with 4 million-plus people overnight, when you're given these constraints, is just something that I think may be beyond human capacity," he said.