RAMALLAH, WEST BANK – More than three months after the guns fell silent in and around the Gaza Strip, the postwar reconstruction of Gaza has moved forward at a snail’s pace, plans for a more hopeful future are stalled, and another giant reckoning appears to be only a matter of time.

“There will be an explosion,” one former senior Palestinian intelligence chief in Ramallah told me. “Whether it’s directed at Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA) or Hamas, no one knows.”

The Gazan population is growing increasingly agitated as conditions in the territory worsen, and all because of the continued standoff between Hamas and Fatah over Palestinian reconciliation. This was the deal that ended the fighting in late August —reconciliation as a precondition to reconstruction— and the deal that all the relevant parties – Hamas, Israel, the PA, Egypt, as well as the United Nations – ostensibly agreed to.

Seven years of Hamas control over Gaza would be gradually replaced by the Fatah-dominated PA, billions of dollars in donor aid would flow in, and the Gazan people would be liberated from the continued rule of an internationally-designated terrorist organization (and the continued need for an Israeli and Egyptian blockade around the territory). Or at least that was the idea.

But all these plans are on hold as Hamas and the PA engage in a game of political chicken, staring each other down , a reality confirmed to me over the past month in conversations with nearly two dozen Israeli and Palestinian officials (from both Fatah and Hamas), international diplomats and non-governmental sources based in Israel and the West Bank, some of whom requested to remain anonymous so as to speak more freely.

The most surprising aspect is the fatalism conveyed by both sides of the Palestinian divide. National unity was, to a man, held up as a necessity for the Palestinian people – yet the actual welfare of those Palestinians living in Gaza has apparently been deemed secondary to the considerations of power politics.

For Fatah, the reconciliation agreement they concluded with their Islamist rivals last April and then again in September was viewed as a capitulation by Hamas, whose rule in Gaza was eroding due to economic constraints placed upon it by the new military-led government in Egypt. This situation was only exacerbated by two months of war in the summer and a renewed crackdown by Cairo on the remaining smuggling tunnels connecting Gaza to the Sinai Peninsula (a key lifeline for the territory and Hamas).

Thus, the initial reconciliation deal tilted heavily in Fatah’s favor, in particular the new “national consensus” government seated in June containing key ministers deemed pliant to PA President Mahmoud Abbas. As Nabil Shaath, a Fatah Central Committee member, told me recently, “Hamas is crying for help out of weakness; they need unity.”

This is where the “national consensus” government was supposed to step in, as the sole legitimate go-between for the international community’s reconstruction efforts. “The PA government is the only practical way to change the dynamics in Gaza,” said a senior UN official in Jerusalem deeply involved in creating the postwar framework. “If we don’t have the PA in Gaza, this will not work.”

All sides, including Hamas, agreed that the PA should return to the territory – initially to take over the border crossings as well as the government ministries there, including the beginning stages of rationalizing the bloated public sector (which in theory consists of both Hamas- and Fatah-affiliated government employees). To date, the PA has done none of these things as long as Hamas has resisted surrendering control.

The agreement to take charge in Gaza was a “strategic mistake,” one senior PA finance official explained. It was, he said, premature to publicly state this intention – and raise the public’s hopes and expectations — before Hamas gave up not only nominal authority in Gaza, but effective authority.

Abbas himself has charged Hamas with continuing to run a “shadow government” in Gaza, and one high-ranking official from the PA’s Preventative Security agency based in Ramallah told me that they would “not repeat the model of [Lebanon’s] Hezbollah in Gaza” whereby one faction maintained a formidable militia outside the control of the central government. “How do you expect me to go work in the Gaza Strip,” this official posited, “when the Qassam Brigades [Hamas’s elite military wing] goes ahead of me in both power and weapons?”

Nabil Shaath insisted in our conversation that the PA’s hesitation with respect to Gaza was grounded in such practical considerations. “Abbas does not want to become the policeman of the border,” he said. “We need to reunify at the ‘heart’ of Gaza, and not just the perimeter.” Practicalities aside, these officials, sitting in Ramallah, betrayed a certain amount of glee at Hamas’s worsening position, “cornered,” as one put it, “in the triangle of Gaza” and “drowning” in the oncoming winter rains.

“Abbas went to the mosque to pray,” the former senior intelligence chief summed up in an allegorical flourish, “but he found the mosque door closed.” In other words, Abbas had every intention to pray, but it was the mosque door (i.e. Hamas) that was at fault.

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Needless to say, Hamas officials view things differently. In an allegorical flourish of his own, one such official, Mohammed Totah, highlighted the need for all sides to climb down from their respective trees, to end the standoff. “But,” he went on to tell me, “Hamas has already climbed down. We’re on the ground.”

Totah, a Hamas parliamentarian originally from Jerusalem, was released from Israeli prison in September. Most of his fellow Hamas leaders weren’t as fortunate. The Hamas parliamentary offices in Ramallah, where I met Totah, were nearly deserted – the product of a wide-ranging Israeli arrest operation in June, undertaken after the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers by a Hamas cell in the West Bank. Those Hamas officials and activists that the Israeli army had not arrested, the PA security forces were now taking care of, embarking on an extensive crackdown of their own. Over the past three months alone, an estimated 300 Hamas members in the West Bank have been arrested by the PA.