Nice job of obfuscation even more nicely denied

Israeli MFA spokesman Mark Regev was on the BBC this morning talking to Dan Damon. He did a good job of sticking to his talking points, but there are two things that struck me. One, he insisted that Israeli had handed Gaza "totally" over to Palestinians. Not quite - Israeli controls the borders and travel and the energy supplies; essentially, Gaza is a giant camp. And Two, no matter how many times Damon asked why Israeli was antagonizing Fatah, Regev always responded with criticism of Hamas. Daman asks, Why is Israel building new settlements on occupied territory, which is delaying the talks? Regev says that first the talks aren't delayed and second, look at Gaza, where we tore down 28 settlements and see what Hamas did! Damon points out that Fatah wants to talk and it's they who are objecting to the settlements. Regev says, no one is keeping Hamas out of the talks, "they're excluding themselves". And so on.

Does Israel really think that Hamas and Fatah are the same thing? Or is this just a good ploy?

And why do we here in the US media have so few reporters who will simply continue to repeat the question, and call people on their unresponsive answers? Of course Damon couldn't force Regev to answer, but he made it pretty clear that he had noticed that Regev wasn't.

(Thanks to fev for catching my error in Mark Regev's name...)