Over the past
month, sectarian violence in both the Gaza Strip and the
In this situation, according to sources in both Fatah and Hamas, talks have now started to create a national unity government which would go some way to dealing with the crisis. However, according to Rafiq Husseini, chief of staff to Fatah president Mahmoud Abbas, the talks will begin this week and will fold unless agreement is reached within two weeks. “After those two weeks we will either come to agreement or not,” he said, suggesting that if talks fail the crisis will worsen.
Hamas first proposed the idea of a national unity government shortly after it won the Palestinian elections last year. This suggestion was rejected by Fatah. Over the course of the year, international aid, the main source of revenue for the Palestinian government, has slowed to a trickle. Led by the U.S. and Canada, donors have refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Hamas government, even though it came to power through democratic elections. This has caused intense financial pressure and created a serious humanitarian crisis for the Palestinian people. Within this situation, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas last month called for early elections, a suggestion which infuriated Hamas and led to open battles between the armed wings of each group. Despite this, the Hamas government has not fallen, much to frustration of the Bush administration.
In this situation, the CIA has openly admitted that it is offering money to Palestinians to oppose Hamas and, in December, the U.S. announced that it was providing an additional $80 million in aid to Abbas to arm and train his personal militia, which numbers in the thousands. Within days of receiving this aid commitment, Abbas declared the Executive Force, an armed wing of Hamas operating in Gaza, an “illegal organization”. On January 8, Abbas issued a decreeing ordering Executive Force be disbanded, something Hamas has so far refused to do.
However, the looming prospect of civil war has made Hamas vulnerable. On January 9, Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh appealed for calm. “We stress the necessity of sparing the Palestinian people any internal confrontations and avoiding using weapons as a medium for dialogue and to focus on dialogue only to solve our differences. The differences exist, they are there, but this does not mean that they should be solved by gunfire,” he said. The fighting “will please enemies of the Palestinians, who want to see civil war.”
Haniyeh’s appeal came around the same time that Mohammed Dahlan, the head of Fatah’s armed wing in Gaza gave an interview to an Israeli newspaper and called Hamas supporters “thugs”. He told Ha’aretz that Hamas has become “a bunch of murderers and thieves who execute Palestinians only because they are Fatah members.”
Throughout all of this, the Israeli government has expressed quiet satisfaction. Short of ethnically cleansing all Palestinians from the occupied territories, nothing would please Israel’s rulers more than to see the Palestinians embroiled in a bloody civil war that would divert their attention from the occupation.