THE HAMAS WAY of DEATH        (Following is a transcript of a recruitment and training videotape made last summer by the Qassam Battalions, the military arm of Hamas, an Islamic Palestinian group. Hamas figures significantly in the Middle East equation. In December, Israel deported more than 400 Palestinians to Lebanon in response to Hamas's kidnapping and execution of an Israeli soldier. A longer version appears in the May issue of Harper's Magazine, which obtained and translated the tape.)        My name is Yasir Hammad al-Hassan Ali. I live in Nuseirat [a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip]. I was born in 1964. I finished high school, then attended Gaza Polytechnic. Later, I went to work for Islamic University in Gaza as a clerk. I'm married and I have two daughters.      The Qassam Battalions are the only group in Palestine explicitly dedicated to jihad [holy war]. Our primary concern is Palestinians who collaborate with the enemy. Many young men and women have fallen prey to the cunning traps laid by the [Israeli] Security Services.      Since our enemies are trying to obliterate our nation, cooperation with them is clearly a terrible crime. Our most important objective must be to put an end to the plague of collaboration. To do so, we abduct collaborators, intimidate and interrogate them in order to uncover other collaborators and expose the methods that the enemy uses to lure Palestinians into collaboration in the first place. In addition to that, naturally, we confront the problem of collaborators by executing them.      We don't execute every collaborator. After all, about 70 percent of them are innocent victims, tricked or black-mailed into their misdeeds. The decision whether to execute a collaborator is based on the seriousness of his crimes. If, like many collaborators, he has been recruited as an agent of the Israeli Border Guard then it is imperative that he be executed at once. He's as dangerous as an Israeli soldier, so we treat him like an Israeli soldier.      There's another group of collaborators who perform an even more loathsome role -- the ones who help the enemy trap young men and women in blackmail schemes that force them to become collaborators. I regard the "isqat" [the process by which a Palestinians is blackmailed into collaboration] of single person as greater crime than the killing of a demonstrator. If someone is guilty of causing repeated cases of isqat, than it is our religious duty to execute him.      A third group of collaborators is responsible for the distribution of narcotics. They work on direct orders from the Security Services to distribute drugs as widely as possible. Their victims become addicted and soon find it unbearable to quit and impossible to afford more. They collaborate in order to get the drugs they crave. The dealers must also be executed.      In the battalions, we have developed a very careful method of uncovering collaborators, We can't afford to abduct an innocent person, because once we seize a person his reputation is tarnished forever. We will abduct and interrogate a collaborator only after evidence of his guilt has been established -- never before. If after interrogation the collaborator is found guilty beyond any doubt, then he is executed.      In many cases, we don't have to make our evidence against collaborators public, because everyone knows that they're guilty. But when the public isn't aware that a certain individual is a collaborator, and we accuse him, people are bound to ask for evidence. Many people will proclaim his innocence, so there must be irrefutable proof before he is executed. This proof is usually obtained in the form of a confession.      At first, every collaborator denies his crimes. So we start off by showing the collaborator the testimony against him. We tell him that he still has a chance to serve his people, even in the last moment of his life, by confessing and giving us the information we need.      We say that we know his repentance in sincere and that he has been a victim. That kind of talk is convincing. Most of them confess after that. Others hold out; in those cases, we apply pressure, both psychological and physical. Then the holdouts confess as well.      Only one collaborator has ever been executed without an interrogation. In that case, the collaborator had been seen working for the Border Guard since before the intifada, and he himself confessed his involvement to a friend, who disclosed the information to us. In addition, three members of his network of collaborators told us that he had caused their isqat. With this much evidence, there was no need to interrogate him. But we are very careful to avoid wrongful executions. In every case, our principal is the same: the accused should be interrogated until he himself confesses his crimes.       A few weeks ago, we sat down and complied a list of collaborators to decide whether there were any who could be executed without interrogation. An although we had hundreds of names, still, because of our fear of God and of hell, we could not mark any of these men, except for the one I just mentioned, for execution.      When we execute a collaborator in public, we use a gun. But after we abduct and interrogate a collaborator, we can't shoot him -- to do so might give away our locations. That's why collaborators are strangled. Sometimes we ask the collaborator, "What do you think? How should we execute you?" One collaborator told us, "Strangle me." He hated the sight of blood.