Gunmen fired on the offices of the Palestinian prime minister in the Gaza Strip on Monday, disrupting a Cabinet meeting just hours after Egyptian officials helped mediate a truce between rival factions.
”We are taking fire,” an aide to Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of the Hamas Islamist movement told Reuters from the building where a Cabinet meeting was suspended because of the shooting from a nearby rooftop. The premier was not harmed.
The official blamed fighters loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas’s secular Fatah group, only one of whose ministers was present. Fatah denied it.
Sporadic shooting elsewhere also followed the new truce, including an attack on a Hamas minister’s office.
In a further denial, Fatah rejected accusations its men were behind what Hamas called an ”assassination attempt” on the Hamas sports minister, a leading associate of Haniyeh.
”It seems Hamas is trying to inflame tension while we are making efforts to calm the situation down,” a Fatah official said.
Heavy fighting, in which six were killed and dozens wounded since Saturday, casts more doubt on the future of the unity coalition formed in three months ago by Hamas and Fatah.
”The ceasefire is limping on crutches and is in danger of collapsing if violations on both sides do not stop,” an official involved in the truce negotiations told Reuters.
The attack on the sports minister’s office was the first on a member of the unity government since Haniyeh brought in Fatah members in March to try to lower tensions and ease international sanctions imposed after Hamas was voted into power last year.
Gunmen also stormed a mosque in Gaza City, damaging a library, Hamas said. The incident sparked a gun battle outside the house of worship. Fatah denied any involvement.
After the shooting, rival gunmen began removing roadblocks from key traffic arteries, in accordance with the truce deal, witnesses said. Egyptian security officials who helped negotiate the truce toured Gaza’s streets to monitor its progress.
Gunfire and sirens
The latest fighting has been the worst since a ceasefire declared a month ago after a wave of violence killed more than 50 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them fighters.
A key motive behind the new truce was to permit 70 000 high school students in Gaza and the occupied West Bank to take their matriculation exams peacefully.
”These clashes were regrettable and harmful,” Abbas said at a high school in the West Bank town of Ramallah where the exams were getting under way. He said both Fatah and Hamas were still working ”to put an end to these phenomena”.
The tests began on schedule in Gaza, but most pupils took circuitous routes to their schools in a bid to avoid the gunmen as the sounds of shooting punctuated the air, witnesses said.
Musbah Abu al-Kheir (17) passed several armed checkpoints on his way to school from a refugee camp outside Gaza City: ”Fatah and Hamas have no appreciation for the fact we are having final exams today,” he said. ”How are we supposed to take exams to the sounds of gunfire and ambulance sirens?”
More than 600 Palestinians are estimated to have been killed in factional fighting since Hamas’s 2006 election victory.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said ahead of a visit to Washington next week and possible talks with Middle East power brokers in Egypt later in the month he was ”prepared to renew talks … at any time” with the United States-backed Abbas.
Abbas cancelled talks with Olmert last week in a dispute over Israel’s withholding of Palestinian tax revenues. A senior aide to Abbas said the president stood ready to meet Olmert any time — once Israel released the money. — Reuters