Gunmen briefly occupied the offices of the mayor of Bethlehem on Tuesday in the countdown to Christmas, highlighting the rampant security chaos in the Palestinian territories.
About 15 masked members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of the ruling Fatah movement, burst into the building on Manger Square, next to the Church of the Nativity where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born.
The gunmen then ordered all staff to leave and closed all the doors.
Mediators dispatched to the building managed to persuade those inside to end their occupation peacefully after about an hour, but not before the gunmen had pulled off a publicity coup designed to embarrass the Palestinian Authority.
Members of the Brigades deployed by the entrance to the building said their colleagues had acted to protest at the Palestinian Authority’s failure to provide financial assistance to about 300 activists.
”They have chosen to do this today in order to draw the international community’s attention to this issue at a time when the eyes of the world are turned towards Bethlehem on the eve of Christmas,” said one Brigades member.
The Palestinian Authority has made efforts to incorporate members of the Brigades into the official security services, but activists who have been co-opted have complained that the government has not paid them.
A large number of police were sent to Manger Square, which will be the focus of Christmas festivities for thousands of pilgrims this weekend.
Local police chief Colonel Issa Hijjo also summoned armed reinforcements from neighbouring districts and threatened to use force to end the stand-off.
However, they were not called into action as negotiations involving the local governor, Salah al-Taamari, and head of preventive security, Majdi al-Attari, ended with the gunmen leaving peacefully.
Contentious events
Bethlehem has been the scene of some of the most contentious events of the five-year-old Palestinian uprising.
Israel laid siege to the Church of Nativity for 38 days in April and May 2002 before withdrawing its troops under a deal that saw 13 of the 123 Palestinians who had been holed up inside sent into exile.
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has consistently pledged, but so far failed, to tame the security chaos in the West Bank and Gaza Strip where gunmen are often able to act with impunity, in the name of ”resistance” to Israel.
Abbas has been trying to persuade factions such as Al-Aqsa and the larger Islamist movement Hamas to lay down their weapons in the aftermath of Israel’s pull-out from the Gaza Strip over the summer.
But the militants have vowed to retain their guns until the withdrawal of Israeli forces from all Palestinian territory.
In another sign of the security mess, a group of Al-Aqsa gunmen also occupied the local offices of Fatah in the city of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza on Tuesday to demand jobs, according to security sources.
Amid the sieges in Bethlehem and Khan Yunis, about 2 000 protesters gathered in downtown Gaza City to demand that the Palestinian Authority do more to reverse the tide of lawlessness. — Sapa-AFP