Hamas Islamist gunmen pressed on with their Gaza offensive on Wednesday, killing at least eight fighters loyal to Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas in a Palestinian power struggle bordering on civil war.
Chanting ”stop the killing”, about 1 000 Palestinians marched through Gaza City — only to draw gunfire in the air from Hamas militants at a nearby police station seized from Abbas’s Fatah forces a day earlier.
At least 56 Palestinians have been killed since Saturday in the fiercest internal violence in months, hospital officials said, with no end in sight after a series of failed Egyptian-brokered truces.
The bloodshed has prompted Fatah, which appears to be losing ground to Hamas in Gaza, to say it was suspending participation in the unity government with Hamas without an immediate ceasefire. The government was formed in March under Saudi mediation to try to end infighting and ease Western sanctions.
Abbas’s group stopped short of withdrawing outright, a move that could lead to presidential rule by decree and widen a divide between the occupied West Bank, where Fatah is dominant and factional fighting is rare, and Gaza, the Hamas powerbase.
In fresh violence, Hamas gunmen attacked an area near the home of a Fatah official, killing six of the group’s men in fighting that went of for several hours, members of Abbas’s faction said.
Two more Fatah gunmen and an unidentified man were killed in separate clashes with Hamas in central Gaza, and 10 other people were wounded, hospital officials said.
Palestinians also took to the streets of the West Bank city of Ramallah to voice their frustrations.
”The weapons that were targeting the occupation are now targeting ourselves — our future our freedom,” said Wafa Abdel-Rahman, referring to Israel. ”Enough is enough.”
Security base
Hamas fighters, however, seemed to be in no mood to halt their campaign.
Wearing black ski masks and aiming their assault rifles in the air, they posed for television cameras at a security base they wrested from Fatah in a battle in the northern Gaza Strip where 15 people were killed on Tuesday.
Piling into the back of a pick-up truck, the gunmen tore through its courtyard, kicking up dust in a show of bravado.
Israel, which pulled settlers and troops out of the Gaza Strip in 2005, has said it would not intervene in the Palestinian fighting.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, an arch-foe of Hamas, said on Tuesday Gaza’s fall to Hamas would have ”great regional significance”, but that Israel could not enter the territory to help Abbas’s ”pragmatists”.
Abbas has failed to persuade Hamas to accept Western demands to recognise Israel, renounce violence and abide by previous Israeli-Palestinian interim peace deals — conditions for ending international sanctions that have deepened Palestinian poverty.
Peace efforts with Israel also have gone nowhere, despite United States attempts to foster a dialogue between Abbas and Olmert and Israeli confidence-building steps to bolster the Fatah leader.
In Tokyo, Palestinian Foreign Minister Ziad Abu Amr, a political independent, said the violence in Gaza could spread to the West Bank, which suffers 70% unemployment. He urged the international community to provide financial aid.
”The idea now is to see how we can salvage the situation,” he said. ”If you have two brothers put into a cage and deprive them of basic essential needs for life, they will fight.” — Reuters