Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas -- under pressure from all sides -- has good reason to be pleased. Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, his opponent in the radical Hamas movement, has signed a document  that has been at the center of the recent inner-Palestinian power struggle. The strife between Abbas and Haniyeh is over, politicians in Gaza claim. Israel also has reason to be pleased: the paper signed by Hamas envisions a Palestinian state the exists exclusively within the West Bank and Gaza Strip and also implicitly recognizes Israel.

Because its charter calls for the destruction of Israel, Hamas had initially refused to sign the paper. But with Israel on the verge of invading Gaza on Tuesday, one journalist in Gaza said the Palestinians wanted to avoid any unnecessary strife amongst themselves. "Hamas's has spared us the referendum that Abbas wanted to hold at the end of July."

Nevertheless, it is still unclear exactly what Abbas and Haniyeh have signed. During the past week, a number of amendments have been made to the original paper written by Palestinian prisoners. And some of these reflect Hamas's ambitions.

Israelis reject document as path to peace

Indeed, all that's certain is that the Israelis don't see the document as part of a path to peace. An Israeli radio station quoted President Moshe Katsav as saying the document was meaningless because it includes a number of demands that Israel finds unacceptable. The document, for example, apparently demands the right of return for Palestinian refugees to their homeland. Jerusalem is also rejecting a paragraph in it document that calls for the creation of a new resistance movement against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian-controlled areas.

Nor is the timing good for making conciliatory gestures. Even as Israeli infantry regiments and tank battalions made their way into Gaza, diplomats feverishly worked to secure the release of the Israeli soldier who suffered minor injuries and was kidnapped after an attack by Palestinians on Sunday. But that didn't appear to keep Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert from carrying out his pledge to conduct a massive military attack against the Gaza Strip if Gilad Schalit, the 19-year-old hostage, wasn't released. For their part, Palestinian militants haven't budged -- they are continuing to fire on southern Israeli towns, and in the West Bank, another Palestinian group claims to have taken an Israeli settler hostage.

In preparation for an inevitable invasion, Palestinians on Tuesday night began block streets with sandbags to stop the Israeli tanks. Many fled the danger zone.

In the run-up to Wednesday's invasion, Olmert had ordered that Gaza be sealed off. He banned the passage of goods or people across the border. He also cut off gasoline supplies to the Palestinians in an effort to put a stop to all vehicle traffic in the Gaza Strip within the next few days.

In an effort to spare his people a further worsening of the situation, Hamas leader and Prime Minister Haniyeh on Tuesday appeared almost statesmanlike. Signing the controversial document wasn't the only step he took. A spokesman for Haniyeh -- speaking the impeccable Hebrew he learned during his five-year term in Israeli prisons -- said the leader wanted the Israeli hostage to be given the best possible treatment. Haniyeh, he added, would seek the prisoner's release.

A divided Hamas

But Hamas appears to be speaking with two tongues. Even as the political arm of Hamas sought to prevent an invasion by the Israelis, its military faction continued with its hard-line position against Israel. Hamas militants said they would only provide information on the condition of the prisoner if Israel released all Palestinian prisoners who are female or under the age of 18. After that, it might be willing to negotiate.

Until now, Hamas has gloated about maintaining unified positions on all important issues. But Hamas's hard-line military wing has now made obvious, for the first time, a rift within the radical Islamic movement. The relatively pragmatic group aligned with Haniyeh contrasts with the military faction led by Ahmad Jaabari, who is said to take his orders directly from Hamas's exiled leader, Khaled Mashaal, in Damascus. And unlike Haniyeh, who has been cut off by most of Palestine's financial backers, Jaabari has access to sufficient financial support and is able to carry out his own plans. That also means that Jaabari has less incentive to release the Israeli soldier.

The Izzedine al-Qassam Brigade, the armed wing of Hamas, also appears to be splitting into two groups with different strategies. A splinter group of the al-Qassam Brigade has broken from the central group and is now working together with the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), which is now controlling parts of the city of Rafah, to create a smorgasbord of radical forces. The splinter group is also working with the Army of Islam movement, which observers in Gaza believe may be an offshoot of al-Qaida. The trio -- working without the prime minister's knowledge -- were responsible for Sunday's attack and the deaths of two soldiers and Schalit's kidnapping.

Haniyeh now wants the hostage problem to be resolved diplomatically, if at all possible. But he also runs the risk of alienating himself from the Palestinian people. As long as thousands of Palestinians sit in Israeli prisons, many Palestinians want Schalit to be kept as a negotiating pawn to secure the prisoners' release. The mothers and fathers of those prisoners protested in Gaza on Tuesday, demanding that Haniyeh not veer from his previous hard-line path against Israel.

Olmert isn't making things any easier for him. The Israeli prime minister says he won't release any Palestinian prisoners. "That's not on our agenda," he said.