Is this it?

[NGONGE]

This makes no difference to the struggle with Israel. Abbas is weak and needs to be removed.

[N.O.R.F]

It may be over. Hamas gaining full control of Gaza!

 

Hamas captures Fatah security HQ

 

Hamas militants have seized the headquarters of their rival Fatah's Preventive Security force, tightening their control over the Gaza Strip.

Witnesses said Hamas had raised its flags over the compound in Gaza City, amid reports 14 Palestinians, mostly Fatah security workers, were killed.

 

Gun battles continued elsewhere in Gaza with Hamas targeting Fatah's security and political command centres.

 

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was holding crisis talks with key aides.

 

Mr Abbas was expected to make a statement later on Thursday.

 

Sources close to Mr Abbas told the BBC he is deciding whether to dismantle the Palestinian cabinet, thereby ending the three-month-old unity government that was meant to stop the violence.

 

Gun battles

 

Hamas is reported to now control almost the entire Gaza Strip, following five days of intense factional fighting in which at least 80 people have been killed.

 

Hamas militants are targeting Fatah's security and political command centres, following a series of battles on Wednesday in which Hamas made important gains in the north and south.

 

Fatah denied the Preventative Security force headquarters had fallen, but witnesses said the green flags of Hamas were now flying from the building.

 

Hamas later demanded that Fatah abandon another key security post, the National Security complex in Gaza City, which came under a barrage of mortar shells overnight.

 

In other parts of the Gaza Strip, Fatah forces blew up key positions rather than surrender them, according to AP news agency.

 

Earlier, Hamas issued an ultimatum to Fatah militants in Gaza to lay down their weapons by 1600 GMT on Friday or risk having them taken from them.

 

Truce conditions

 

Thursday's fighting came despite a call from Mr Abbas and Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, of Hamas, for all sides to halt the fighting.

 

The BBC's Aleem Maqbool in Ramallah says that after an aggressive military campaign Hamas feels it has now gained enough ground to call the political shots.

 

The Islamist movement has laid a series of demands on the table which it says Fatah has to agree to if there is to be peace and if the two parties are to continue to govern together.

 

The conditions include appointing an interior minister responsible for all Palestinian security forces and shared control of Gaza's boundaries and borders.

 

Mr Abbas is considering these proposals, but it is difficult to see how he or his party are in any position to argue with Hamas, our correspondent says.

 

Analysts say that if the fighting is not checked, Palestinians could be split into a Fatah-dominated West Bank and Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

 

The international community has called for a ceasefire, and Arab League head Amr Moussa said the fighting was destroying the Palestinian cause.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6751079.stm

[N.O.R.F]

What chances Abbas dismantling the unity govnt on the advice of US/Isreal/UN/Russia (quartet) then for a UN force to be deployed quicker than you can say shawarma?

[Jacaylbaro]

He is a puppet and they will support him no matter what ,,,,,,,,, should we expect US air strike on Hamas this time ??

 

It can be possible ,,,,,,,,,,, i mean from Bush

[NGONGE]

Originally posted by Northerner:

What chances Abbas dismantling the unity govnt on the advice of US/Isreal/UN/Russia (quartet) then for a UN force to be deployed quicker than you can say shawarma?

Very good. But, again like with the ICU, Hamas is/was bringing all this on itself really.

[Allamagan]

Things not going well in Falastiin. Sad to see Palestinians killing each other when they are sarounded by sworn enemy subhanallah!. And now that there are 2 PMs & 1 president, situation evet got out of hand.

 

I think Fatah is the problem and most of Palestinians not happy with them and therefore should go and let Hamas to steer... The incompetent arab league but what can they do?

[Fabregas]

quote:The US will lift a 15-month embargo on aid to the Palestinians once a new emergency government excluding Hamas is sworn in, a US envoy in Jerusalem

 

This must be a biggest joke I have heard in a long time.

[Fabregas]

Originally posted by NGONGE:

quote:Originally posted by Northerner:

What chances Abbas dismantling the unity govnt on the advice of US/Isreal/UN/Russia (quartet) then for a UN force to be deployed quicker than you can say shawarma?

Very good. But, again like with the ICU, Hamas is/was bringing all this on itself really.

I disagree, Hamas has been trying to reason with Mohamed Daxlan and his lot, who have been intent on creating mass instability in the Gaza and attempting to crumble the so called government. This group was gathering weapons for Hamas and in indirect and direct collusion with Israel, America and Arab states. So Hamas did what it had to do(get rid of this threat) One of the U.N officials said that Americans were lobbying in the backgrounds to prevent Fatah from making a deal and forming a unity government with Hamas. All in all the Palestinian people will suffer as usual.

[N.O.R.F]

Palestine descends into abyss

By Osama Al Sharif, Special to Gulf News

 

 

 

Parts of the jigsaw puzzle are falling into place and a dangerous game is about to start - one whose outcome not even the United States and Israel can control.

 

What happened in Gaza last week was a political earthquake, which left all those who had helped, directly or indirectly, stoke the fires that led to a bloody Fatah-Hamas confrontation stunned and outmanoeuvred.

 

It is not Hamastan yet, but odds are that Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's reaction to the routing of his forces in Gaza at the hands of Hamas militants will not reverse the fact that the strip, which is home to more than 1.4 million Palestinians, is no longer under his control.

 

By declaring a state of emergency and firing Prime Minister Esmail Haniya, Abbas, with US prodding, may have driven himself and his PNA into a blind alley.

 

But if anyone is surprised, concerned or shocked by the results of last week's events in Gaza, it should not be Abbas, the Israelis or the Americans.

 

For months, ever since Hamas contested and won the legislative elections in January of last year, the three, later joined by most Arab countries and the Europeans, have been colluding to undermine the new government.

 

When international sanctions bit hard throughout the embattled Palestinian society, Abbas and Hamas relented and signed on to a Saudi- backed initiative in Makkah. They agreed to form a national unity government headed by Haniya.

 

Economic siege

 

By that time a state of lawlessness had prevailed in Gaza and most of the West Bank. The Makkah accord did not bring the two sides closer nor did it help end the economic siege.

 

The US continued to boycott Hamas ministers while Israel refused to ease its blockade and denied Abbas any political gains. Fatah backed militias in Gaza, loyal to Mohammad Dahlan, continued to beef up their forces, receiving military hardware and personnel through Egypt.

 

Bloody fights on the eve of Al Naqba, the 1948 war, between Hamas and Fatah, left dozens dead and tens injured. The build-up to last week's battles had begun.

 

With the failure to bring the security agencies, all answering to Abbas and his henchmen, under government's command, the stage was ready for a final showdown. What Abbas and his US allies had miscalculated was that Hamas, while battered by recent Israeli strikes against its positions and personnel, was not fatally injured.

 

When Dahlan's forces made their move, Hamas fought back hard and overran Abbas loyalists. It was all over within three days.

 

The question now is how to deal with the new reality in Gaza. Arab reaction, represented by the Arab League foreign ministers' emergency meeting, is mostly rhetorical.

 

It is up to Abbas and Hamas top man Khalid Mesha'al, who is in exile in Damascus, to reach a compromise. But that requires courage and most of all freedom of decision away from external pressure.

 

It is unlikely that both men will able to set aside brinkmanship and rise up to the challenge that now faces the Palestinian people. The polarisation of the Palestinians has been compounded by Israeli occupation, short-sighted US policy, foreign intervention and even infiltration.

 

As Gaza events unfolded, a confidential report by UN special to the Middle East envoy Alvaro de Soto charged that US pressure had "pummelled into submission" the UN's role as an impartial negotiator, that it had made the Middle East peace process subservient to wider policies on Iraq and Iran, and that the US had got the other members of the Quartet negotiating team - the EU, Russia and the UN - to impose sanctions on the government formed after painful negotiations between Fatah and Hamas.

 

The sanctions did not encourage the unity government to function properly. They killed it off, he said in his 52-page end of mission report published by the Guardian.

 

Since the outbreak of the second Intifada, Israel has been pushing towards, and benefiting from, Palestinian fragmentation. On the ground it has been implementing a sinister plan to partition the West Bank and isolate its cities and towns. Meanwhile, it has escalated its campaign to sabotage PNA institutions and hunt down over one third of Palestinian legislators, mostly from Hamas.

 

State of division

 

In reality Abbas has lost control and may soon find himself unable to sway his own Fatah loyalists. For Hamas extending its influence over the West Bank is a remote possibility.

 

The coming weeks will deepen the state of division among the Palestinians while the US and Israel ponder the consequences of the latest developments.

 

The spectre of a Hamas victory in Gaza is a roadmap for disaster to the national Palestinian cause of liberation. The outcome may be something similar to the rise of Islamic courts in Somalia two years ago.

 

A Palestinian Islamist enclave will not be tolerated by either Egypt or Israel and both will be tempted, with US prompting, to take drastic action to undermine it.

 

Furthermore, the loss of Gaza to the Islamists will be a deep blow to Palestinian unity, both at home and in the diaspora. The fragmentation of the Palestinians could be the penultimate step in a fiendish plan to grab what remains of their land while breaking the people into many tribes and clans.

 

The current slide into soft civil war in Gaza is a bellwether of things to come as much as the infiltration of refugee camps in Lebanon by rogue movements points to vague attempts to readdress the status of Palestinians in that country.

 

A possible way out of the current fix is for Hamas to agree to early elections and for Fatah to put its house in order and help fight the state of lawlessness that has spread across Palestinian territories.

 

At another level Abbas should seriously consider disbanding the PNA and declaring all of the West Bank as occupied lands thus forcing Israel to face its responsibilities as occupier.

 

Osama Al Sharif is a Jordanian journalist based in Amman.

 

 

gulfnews.com

[N.O.R.F]

Things are developing rapidly

 

Abbas outlaws Hamas

Agencies

 

 

 

Ramallah: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday outlawed the Islamic militant Hamas movement, his office said.

 

A formal announcement was to be released shortly, said aides in Abbas' office.

 

Abbas also swore in an emergency Cabinet, to replace the Hamas-Fatah coalition he dismantled after Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip by force.

 

The Cabinet is led by respected economist Salam Fayyad, who will also serve as finance minister.

 

Earlier, Abbas had issued decrees to bypass constitutional limits on his powers to establish an emergency government shutting out Islamist Hamas, aides said on Sunday.

 

They said the decrees, issued late on Saturday, would allow Abbas, who heads the secular Fatah, to keep a planned cabinet in place without parliamentary approval. The new 13-member cabinet was to be sworn in at 1 p.m.

 

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

Hamas ousted Fatah from the Gaza Strip last week, prompting Abbas to dissolve the factions' coalition government and declare a state of emergency. Hamas had rejected the moves as a "coup".

 

Under Palestinians law, the state of emergency is not to exceed 30 days, but it could be extended for another period of 30 days after winning the approval of two thirds of the parliament.

 

Hamas holds a majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council though Israeli arrests of its deputies makes it difficult to reach a quorum and hold decision-making sessions.

 

That could enable Abbas to keep the state of emergency in place longer. Some Fatah officials and US diplomats have argued that Abbas could rule by decree for six months to a year ahead of new elections.

 

 

gulfnews.com

[N.O.R.F]

Mods place take this to the politics sections. Thanks

 

BBC reporter to be released 'in next few hours'

Agencies

 

 

Tehran: A Hamas official said BBC reporter Alan Johnston, who was abducted in Gaza three months ago, will be released in the next few hours.

 

Abu Osameh Al Moti, representative of Hamas in Iran, told reporters on Sunday, "The BBC journalist will be released within the next hours, today."

 

Johnston, the only Western correspondent based full-time in Gaza, was seized on March 12. His abductors, a little-known group called the Army of Islam, issued a video of him on June 1 in which he said he was in good health and being treated well.

 

A Hamas official in Gaza, Sami Abu Zuhri, said: "We can confirm that there are intensive efforts to end the crisis of the abduction of Alan Johnston. There are encouraging indicators that he will be released in the near future. But we cannot determine this in terms of hours."

 

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

Hamas said on Friday it was in an advanced stage of negotiations over the release of the British reporter, and Al Mo'ti indicated the talks were still going on. He did not specify how he knew that Johnston would be freed.

 

A BBC spokesman in London declined to comment.

[Rahima]

Each day you think it can't get worse, and sadly it does.

 

May Allah raise our status.

[N.O.R.F]

The Hamas Response

 

Obstacles to peace

Hamas wants to create a climate of peace and end all internal strife. But the international community must fully engage with us.

 

The events in Gaza over the last few days have been described in the west as a coup. In essence they have been the opposite. Eighteen months ago Hamas won the Palestinian elections and entered office but never had the handover of power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Abu Mazen, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning the losing Fatah party to power while more than 40 of our elected parliamentarians in the West Bank languish in Israeli jails. That is the real coup.

 

From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces with Hamas and governing in an unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a 10-year ceasefire with the Israelis to try and create an atmosphere of calm in which we can try to resolve our differences. Hamas even held a unilateral ceasefire over an 18-month period in an attempt to normalise the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognised in the media coverage of the last few days.

 

Nor has it been evident to many people in the west that the civil unrest in Gaza and the West Bank has been precipitated by the US and Israeli policy of arming elements of the Fatah opposition to attack Hamas, the winning side in our democratic election, and try and force us out of office. We have, for 18 months tried to find ways to coexist with Fatah, entering into a unity government with them, even conceding key positions in the cabinet to their and international demands, negotiating up until the last moment to try and provide security for all of our people on the streets of Gaza. Sadly it became apparent that not all of Fatah were negotiating in good faith. A number of attempts on Prime Minister Haniyeh's life last week proved this and eventually we were forced into trying to take control of a very dangerous situation in order to provide a sense of political stability and establish law and order.

 

The situation on the streets of Gaza is now calm for the first time in a very long time. We have begun the process of disarming some of the drug dealers and the armed gangs on the street and we hope to restore a real sense of security and safety to the citizens of Gaza. We want to get children back to school, get basic services functioning again, and provide long-term economic horizons for our people.

 

Our stated aim when we won the election was to effect reform, end corruption and bring economic prosperity to our people. Our sole focus is Palestinian rights and good governance. We now hope to create a climate of peace and tranquility within our community that will pave the way for an end to all internal strife and bring about the release of Alan Johnston whose kidnapping by non-Hamas members is a stain on the reputation of the Palestinian people.

 

We reject attempts to divide Palestine into two parts and to pass Hamas off as an extreme and dangerous force. We believe as we have said many times that there is still a chance to establish a long-term truce that will guarantee a peace of mind for all for many years to come. But this will not happen without a full engagement of Hamas by the international community. Any further attempts to marginalise, starve our people into submission or attack us militarily will prove that the US and Israeli governments are not genuinely interested in seeing an end to the violence. Dispassionate observers over the next few weeks will be able to make up their own minds as to each side's true intentions.

 

CiF

[N.O.R.F]

What now?

 

 

Gazans flood through Egypt border

 

Gazans have suffered shortages for months

 

 

Crossing the border

Tens of thousands of Palestinians have surged into Egypt from the Gaza Strip after masked militants destroyed parts of the border wall.

Gazans rushed to buy food, fuel and other supplies that have become scarce because of an Israeli blockade - aimed at stopping rocket attacks from Gaza.

 

Egyptian police took no action to stop people crossing.

 

Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak says he allowed Gazans in to buy food, but Israel urged Egypt to restore security.

 

Hamas leader Ismail Haniya called for urgent talks with Egypt and his Palestinian rival, President Mahmoud Abbas, on border crossings.

 

 

Map of the Egypt-Gaza border area

"We do not want to control everything, we are part of the Palestinian people," Mr Haniya said, apparently in response to an offer from Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayad to control Gaza's borders - so far rejected by Israel.

 

Hamas has controlled Gaza since last June.

 

Guns seized

 

A total of 350,000 Gazans crossed the Egyptian border, Israel's Haaretz newspaper reported.

 

Hamas has not taken responsibility for breaching the border but quickly moved in to police it, the paper said, confiscating seven pistols from a man returning to Gaza.

 

We want to buy rice and sugar, milk and wheat and some cheese

 

Ibrahim Abu Taha,

Gaza resident

 

 

Eyewitness: Drama at border

In pictures: Border breached

Gaza diary: Day One

Haaretz quoted one Gazan, Mohammed Abu Ghazel, as saying he had crossed the border three times with cigarettes which he had sold for five times the price he bought them.

 

"This can feed my family for a month," he said.

 

Correspondents say the breaching of the border is a security concern for Israel, as Egypt is a main source of weapons for the militant groups in Gaza.

 

 

But the BBC's Tim Franks in Rafah on the Gaza-Egypt border says it will be difficult for the Egyptians to reseal the border on their own, and Hamas has very little incentive to co-operate.

 

EGYPT-GAZA BORDER

12km (7.4 miles) long

Egyptian side patrolled by 750 soldiers under 2005 agreement with Israel

Border crossing terminal south of town of Rafah

PA control of terminal under EU supervision collapsed after Hamas takeover of Gaza in June 2007

Border closed almost continuously since

 

 

Gaza's rocket threat to Israel

'Wartime' on Israeli border

Profile: Gaza Strip

 

Palestinians have broken through the border before, in 2005, and it was quickly resealed with barbed wire, but reports say that on this occasion two-thirds of the border wall was destroyed.

 

Overnight, gunmen set off a number of explosions along the wall near the Rafah crossing.

 

People then packed into cars and donkey carts, or crossed the border on foot, to buy essential goods.

 

Among them was Ibrahim Abu Taha, a father of seven, who told the Associated Press news agency: "We want to buy rice and sugar, milk and wheat and some cheese."

 

 

One Gaza woman told the BBC as she crossed the border: "We're going over there to our family. They're all there. I haven't seen [them] for 10 years."

 

Mostly sealed

 

President Mubarak said he had allowed the Palestinians to come in.

 

GAZA BLOCKADE

17 January: Israel seals border following rise in rocket attacks

20 January: Gaza's only power plant to shuts down

22 January: Israel eases restrictions

22 January: Egyptian border guards disperse Palestinian protest against closure

23 January: Border wall breached

 

He said he had told Egyptian troops to "let them come to eat and buy food and go back, as long as they are not carrying weapons".

 

Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Arye Mekel said his government was concerned about the chaos.

 

But in a BBC interview, he added: "It's the responsibility of Egypt to ensure that the border operates properly according to the signed agreements."

 

US State Department spokesman Tom Casey said Washington was concerned about the situation, as was Egypt.

 

In recent months the border has been mostly sealed, in an understanding between Israel and Egypt.

 

The territory has been short of fuel and other essential goods since last week, when Israel imposed the blockade.

 

It was eased slightly on Tuesday to allow some fuel and medicines through.

 

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7204029.stm

[Paragon]

Exciting! I just watched the news with such delight.

 

At last the Egyptians have come to their Arab senses. They are doing the right thing by letting the Gazans go through for basic supplies.

 

Markii horeba waxa ku qasbay carab walaalahood ah in ay ku block gareeyaan Gaza just for the benefit of Israel ayaaba la yaab lahayd.