The armed wing of the Palestinian movement Hamas declared a five-month truce with Israel over on Tuesday as it claimed to have fired dozens of rockets into the Jewish state on its Independence Day. Israel vowed to ”confront terrorists” who fired the barrage, which caused no injuries or damage, on the 59th anniversary of the state’s creation.
The BBC said on Thursday it has been assured by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that its Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston, kidnapped a month ago, is ”safe and well”, and again appealed for his release. There has been no word on the fate of Johnston (44) since he was forced from his car at gunpoint exactly one month ago.
Palestinian prime minister-designate Ismail Haniya said on Monday that he expects to unveil a new government formed by his Hamas faction and the moderate Fatah party by the end of next week. Speaking to his outgoing Hamas-led Cabinet, Haniya said he would continue talks with Palestinian President and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas on Monday and Tuesday.
Thousands of Palestinians rallied in Gaza City in support of Islamic Jihad on Friday, setting fire to Israeli and United States flags as the radical Islamists vowed to make more attacks on the Jewish state. ”Talk about a ceasefire is premature because our priority must remain resistance,” Islamic Jihad leader Nafiz Azzam told the gathered masses.
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/ 30 January 2007
Gunmen shot dead a Hamas commander in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday and the Islamist group blamed a Fatah-dominated security service for the first killing in the territory since a ceasefire went into effect overnight. Hospital officials in the southern town of Khan Younis said Hussein Shabasi was shot in the head.
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/ 26 January 2007
Rival Palestinian factions clashed across the Gaza Strip, killing six people, as thousands of Hamas supporters marched on Friday to mark the Islamist group’s election victory over Fatah opponents last year. The escalating violence forced the postponement of talks to form a coalition government.
Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said on Friday he and President Mahmoud Abbas had agreed to keep gunmen from their rival Hamas and Fatah factions off Gaza’s streets after clashes in which eight were killed. Factional fighting has surged in Gaza and the occupied West Bank since Abbas challenged the ruling Hamas faction by calling for early elections.
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/ 21 December 2006
A fragile ceasefire aimed at halting deadly clashes between rival Palestinian factions held in Gaza for a second day on Thursday as President Mahmoud Abbas urged all sides to consolidate the truce. No clashes between Abbas’s Fatah party and the ruling Hamas movement have been reported since early on Wednesday.
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/ 20 December 2006
Scores of masked men fought a running gun battle in Gaza City on Wednesday, rattling a new ceasefire drawn up to try to stop a Palestinian power struggle spinning dangerously out of control. Two loyalists from the Fatah faction of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas were killed in a four-hour fight with men from the ruling Hamas movement.
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/ 19 December 2006
Gun battles raged between Hamas loyalists and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s forces in Gaza on Tuesday, killing at least three people and reviving fears the strip could slip into civil war. Internal Palestinian fighting — the worst in a decade — has escalated since Abbas called on Saturday for early elections in an attempt to break a political deadlock.
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/ 15 December 2006
The ruling Hamas group accused Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah of starting a war after his security forces opened fire on Friday on a Hamas rally in the West Bank and fire fights broke out in Gaza. ”What a war, Mahmoud Abbas, you are launching, first against God and then against Hamas,” senior Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya said.
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/ 11 December 2006
Unidentified gunmen killed three sons of a Palestinian intelligence official loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas in Gaza on Monday, firing at a car as it dropped the boys at school, police and hospital officials said. An adult bystander was also killed in the attack in Gaza City, which came amid growing tension between Hamas, the governing militant group, and Abbas’s more moderate Fatah.
Fatah gunmen threatened on Tuesday to kill leaders of the governing Hamas group, escalating a power struggle marked by the worst internal violence in Gaza and the West Bank since the Palestinian Authority was created in 1994. On a visit to the Middle East, United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged an end to the bloodshed.
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/ 11 September 2006
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas reached a deal with Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas on Monday to form a unity government the Palestinians hope will end their international isolation and revive aid. But the Hamas Islamist group said it will never recognise Israel, raising immediate questions over whether a unity coalition will satisfy Western demands for lifting sanctions.
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/ 7 September 2006
Rival Palestinian factions are close to forming a new power-sharing government, which Hamas expects to lead, the Palestinian Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, said this week. A national unity government is intended to lift the international freeze on funding to the Palestinian Authority, which has left it facing an economic crisis and a wave of strikes by thousands of unpaid civil servants.
A previously unknown militant group in Gaza claimed responsibility on Wednesday for the kidnapping nine days ago of two Fox journalists and demanded the United States release ”Muslim prisoners” within 72 hours. ”Release what you have, and we will release what we have,” the ”Holy Jihad Brigades” said in a statement.
Israel pressed on with its air assault on Gaza on Friday in a bid to retrieve a soldier abducted nearly three weeks ago and stop rocket attacks but troops withdrew from the centre of the territory. The continued offensive came as the United States vetoed a United Nations resolution calling on Israel to halt its military operations in Gaza.
Three Palestinian family members, including a six-year-old girl, were killed on Saturday in an air strike on Gaza City as Israel rejected a call by Hamas premier Ismail Haniya for a mutual ceasefire. The girl, her elder brother and her mother were killed in the air raid which according to an army spokesperson targeted a group of militants east of Gaza City.
Israeli forces pushed through Gaza’s key eastern commercial crossings before dawn on Saturday, killing at least four Palestinians, witnesses and security sources said. Dozens of tanks passed through the Karni and Nahal Oz crossings at the eastern edge of the narrow coastal strip and advanced around one kilometre to neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Gaza City.
Five Palestinians were killed on Friday as Israel pressed on with its bloody offensive in Gaza, a day after reoccupying land in the deadliest 24 hours in the Palestinian territories for four years. Twenty-seven Palestinians and one Israeli soldier have been killed since the offensive began late on Wednesday.
The captors of an Israeli soldier abducted last week do not want to kill the serviceman despite the expiry of an ultimatum to Israel. ”Some people thought that the groups that carried out the operation will kill him but our Islamic values tell us that prisoners should be respected and not killed,” said Abu Muthanna, a spokesperson for the Islamic Army.
Israeli warplanes pounded Gaza for a second straight night as Palestinian militants holding an army corporal issued new demands on Saturday for the release of prisoners from Israeli jails. The regional fallout of the crisis also deepened, with Washington backing its key ally in holding arch foe Syria at least partially responsible for the escalation.
The governing Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas has taken a key step towards recognising Israel after reaching a deal on a crisis-solving plan that implicitly recognises its arch foe’s right to exist. The deal followed weeks of talks on a blueprint calling for an end to attacks in Israel and a national-unity government.
The Gaza Strip, the lesser half of the Palestinians’ promised future state, is home to 1,4-million residents who struggle against poverty and violence on the shores of the Mediterranean. The Israeli army, which captured the territory from Egypt during the 1967 Six-Day War, on Wednesday launched its first serious ground offensive since leaving the territory on September 12 2005.
Deadly factional violence and the storming of Parliament by protesters on Wednesday threatened to overshadow a new round of cross-party Palestinian talks seeking to cap tensions between Fatah and Hamas. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, leader of the Hamas-led government, in Gaza City.
Eleven people, including two children, were killed in the northern Gaza Strip on Tuesday in the deadliest air strike this year by the Israeli military in the territory. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas swiftly condemned the strike as ”state terrorism” and called on the international community to intervene.
Israeli troops staged their first ground operation in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday since pulling out of the territory last year, killing three Islamic Jihad militants and a Palestinian police officer. Three other militants were also killed in the occupied West Bank overnight, making it the deadliest spike in violence since the radical Islamist movement Hamas came to power.
The Hamas government on Friday recalled a controversial paramilitary force from the streets of Gaza on the second day of cross-party talks to resolve deadly Palestinian feuding. The move came one day after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas threatened to call a referendum to end the deadly rivalry between Hamas and his former ruling Fatah party.
The Hamas-led Palestinian government accused Israeli leader Ehud Olmert on Wednesday of having no interest in negotiating a peace settlement, despite his pledge to meet Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. On Tuesday Olmert said that he would seek to set the final borders of Israel on a unilateral basis only after exhausting negotiation efforts.
One Jordanian was killed and at least seven Palestinians wounded as rising tensions between the rival Hamas and Fatah factions erupted into heavy fighting near Parliament in Gaza on Monday. A driver at the Jordanian representation was killed in the running gun battle close to the Legislative Council building.
In the al-Shifa hospital, the walls are decrepit and dirty. The elevators are broken. It is a sign of the times in Gaza City, brought to its knees by the international community’s refusal to do business with a Hamas-led government. ”If this continues, the majority of our services will cease to operate in two weeks’ time,” said Dr Jumaa al-Saqqa, the spokesperson at the impoverished Gaza Strip’s main hospital.
Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas was on Friday locked in a battle of wills with the Hamas government, revoking its decisions to create a new special force and name a top militant to a key security post. The head-on collision sent tensions soaring between the moderate Palestinian Authority president and the radical Islamists, marking the first time Abbas has revoked decisions by the Hamas government since it was sworn in last month.