What happened
This is the founding act of Hamas's governance of Gaza, and it sets the pattern for nearly everything that follows in this track of the file: Hamas's only genuine democratic mandate — the 2006 legislative election win recorded elsewhere in this seeder — was converted into exclusive, unelected control of a single territory through a week of internal killing, not through any further vote.
Human Rights Watch investigators, working in Gaza in the takeover's immediate aftermath, documented a pattern that went well beyond the ordinary casualties of factional street fighting: bound prisoners shot at close range, at least one thrown from the roof of a multi-storey building, and Fatah-affiliated security officers executed after they had already surrendered. Fatah's own forces committed reprisal killings against Hamas members in the West Bank around the same period, which HRW also documented and condemned — this was not a case of one side behaving well and the other badly, but the entry is placed here because Hamas's takeover is what produced Gaza's subsequent 18 years of single-party rule, which is the specific governance failure this track of the file is tracing.
The practical result has persisted for nearly two decades: no Palestinian government since 2007 has had a mandate covering both territories, no unified Palestinian election has been possible, and the split has been cited by successive Israeli governments as a reason unified Palestinian statehood negotiations cannot proceed — a genuine obstacle, though one that does not excuse the settlement expansion and occupation policies documented in IsraelTimelineSeeder, which continued throughout the same period regardless of Palestinian political unity.