Israeli tanks crossed into the Gaza Strip on Tuesday near a key crossing point where about 150 Palestinians have been trapped while trying to flee from the territory since Hamas Islamists took it over.
An Israeli army spokesperson said the tanks entered Gaza to protect the Erez crossing, where a gunman from Gaza shot dead a security officer loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and wounded several others on Monday.
Israeli civilian medics have been put on standby to evacuate wounded and ill Palestinians at the crossing who seek to flee to the West Bank or to Israeli hospitals amid violence between gunmen from Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah group.
An Israeli army bulldozer was seen razing concrete barriers at Erez. Several water bottles were thrown from a tank to Palestinians.
The Israeli military spokesperson said the army had not begun any evacuation efforts.
Hamas gunmen took over the Gaza Strip last week after deadly clashes with security forces loyal to Abbas, the Fatah leader.
Dozens of Palestinians at Erez were seen sitting and lying down on the dusty ground, some barefoot or in casts. Children sat behind luggage and others in the arms of their mothers.
”This is the fifth day for us in the crossing,” said Um Mohammed. ”We will not be able to come back to Gaza. Internal fighting chased us to Erez after we fled from Gaza. We fled Gaza because we are not safe — everybody is threatened.”
An aide to Olmert quoted him on Monday as saying Israel would not intervene or move forces but would ”take into consideration all humanitarian needs in Gaza”.
The refugees at Erez have also been caught in the crossfire during shoot-outs between the Israeli army and militants.
”Yesterday [Monday], the Israeli army fired a tear gas [canister] that fell near me and we were suffocated,” said Tawfiq Yaghi, who sought to bring his wife to Israel for chemotherapy. ”It is a humanitarian case and I must be allowed. My wife is dying.”
Israel plans funding clampdown on Gaza
Meanwhile, Israel plans to tighten a financial clampdown on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip that would choke off all but humanitarian and basic supplies, senior Israeli and Western officials said on Tuesday.
While opening the funding taps to the Western-backed emergency government set up by President Mahmoud Abbas in the occupied West Bank, Israel and the United States want to isolate Hamas financially, diplomatically and militarily in the Gaza Strip, which the Islamist group seized by force last week.
To that end, two senior Israeli officials said the plan was to bar Palestinian tax funds transferred to Abbas from reaching Gaza to run Hamas-led agencies and pay workers.
”Gaza is a terrorist-controlled entity now,” said one of the Israeli officials, who is working with US officials to isolate Hamas. ”No financial assistance can go to any entity or person with connections to the Hamas-run administration in Gaza.”
The Israeli officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Israel was discussing with the US the scope of their Gaza embargo. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will meet US President George Bush at the White House on Tuesday.
Israeli and Western officials said humanitarian supplies would not be cut off and may be increased.
Hamas spokesperson Fawzi Barhoum called the financial sanctions a ”failed policy” and part of a ”Zionist-American plot”, adding: ”Any siege on the Gaza Strip will beget an explosion in the faces of all of those who took part in imposing the siege.”
Emergency government
Palestinian Information Minister Riyad al-Malki said the emergency government knew of no Israeli conditions on the tax funds that Israel collects on the Palestinian Authority’s behalf. ”We will not accept any conditions. We determine how we will spend it,” he said.
Majdi al-Khalidi, an adviser in Abbas’s office, told Western diplomats in a closed-door meeting on Monday that the current emergency government could remain for a period of two months and then become a caretaker administration that could try to lay the ground for new elections.
A senior Western diplomat said Abbas’s office told them that the emergency government does not want the international community to have ”any contact or provide any legitimacy to Hamas in Gaza”.
”But they do want them to facilitate delivery of humanitarian assistance,” the diplomat said. ”They would like the normal flow of utilities and trade.”
Abbas’s aides said the emergency government believed it had a responsibility to pay those workers in Gaza, including members of the security services, who follow the instructions of the new government and not the Hamas administration.
”But it’s unclear how they would make that distinction,” one senior Western diplomat said.
The emergency government could use Arab funds, rather than the tax money transferred by Israel, to pay Gaza workers.
Israel is also considering banning private transfers to individual Gazans through Western Union and other financial institutions, one senior Israeli official said.
The US and the European Union have thrown their support behind Abbas’s new government, announcing they will end a 15-month-old economic embargo of the Palestinian Authority.
Israeli officials estimated that $300-million to $400-million in Palestinian tax revenues would be transferred to the emergency government in the West Bank, short of the $700-million sought by Abbas. Israeli officials say the rest of the money has been frozen by court order.
”We will do it [transfers] in steps,” said the senior Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
It is unclear whether the EU will go along with US and Israeli efforts to isolate Gaza, whose 1,5-million residents are aid-dependent. — Reuters