Fighting between rival Palestinian forces erupted again on Sunday in the Gaza Strip, where 23 people have been killed in the fiercest bout of internecine bloodletting since Hamas won elections a year ago.
Three Palestinians died overnight as militants from the ruling Hamas clashed with Fatah gunmen loyal to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya, witnesses said.
Hamas militants fired anti-tank rockets and mortar shells at the headquarters of a Fatah-controlled police force in Gaza City and blew up the home of a senior aide to Fatah’s Gaza strongman, Mohammad Dahlan.
Throughout Gaza, the warring factions have set up road blocks and continue to trade bursts of machine-gun fire.
Twenty-three Palestinians have died in the clashes and at least 50 injured since Thursday evening, according to medical sources.
The three-day surge in violence has torpedoed talks on forming a national-unity government and left the impoverished Gaza Strip teetering on the brink of civil war.
Among the victims in the latest flare-up were an 11-year-old boy snared in the crossfire on Saturday night and a two-year-old child killed by a stray bullet during a firefight in the southern Gaza town of Khan Yunis on Friday.
The unprecedented infighting has turned the Gaza Strip into a ghost town as shopkeepers boarded up shops and stayed in the relative safety of their homes.
The tension threatens to spread to the West Bank, where Palestinian police swinging batons and firing into the air clashed on Saturday with 200 Hamas supporters who rallied to denounce the shooting of a Hamas member in Tulkarem.
The rival factions are each blaming the other for provoking the violence, which is only exacerbating the woes of Palestinians already suffering a crippling economic crisis because of a Western aid freeze.
Hamas has called for Abbas, who is in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum, to return immediately to the Palestinian territories to help put an end to the mounting bloodshed.
The Arab League condemned the latest fighting as “irrational and unacceptable,” while Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood lashed out at both parties to the conflict. — AFP