| Hamas operative in Gaza |
The Palestinian factions continue their usual cordial relations. From the Washington Free Beacon, by
JERUSALEM—In a scathing criticism of Hamas, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas ridiculed the organization’s claims of victory in the recent confrontation with Israel and accused it over the weekend of executing 120 Gaza residents for breaching a curfew during the war, an allegation heretofore not heard publicly.
Referring to Hamas’ boast at the end of the 50-day war that it was “allowing Israelis to return to their homes,” he noted that 400,000 Gazans had been left homeless by the war. “Who will return Gaza’s residents to their homes,” he asked sarcastically. Although 4,000 rockets had been fired into Israel, he noted, only three persons had been killed.
He asked how Hamas could have been surprised by Israel’s military response after having abducted and murdered three Israeli teenagers and then firing rockets into Israel.
Abbas has previously condemned Hamas for publicly executing alleged informers for Israel during the war (the numbers given range from 27 to 38 executions) without trial. In a meeting with journalists in Cairo Saturday night, he said “Hamas also conducted atrocities at the war’s end when it executed 120 people without trial because they breached the curfew.”
The Palestinian Authority signed an agreement with Hamas several months ago to form a national unity “technocratic” government that would end seven years of rival Palestinian governments in the West Bank and Gaza.
This isn’t the first time Fatah members have blasted Hamas since
the end of Hamas’s recent war against Israel.
On August 30, the Fatah Central Committee accused Hamas of
targeting Fatah members in Gaza during the war and of stealing humanitarian aid.
According to the Jerusalem Post:
The statement said Hamas placed more than 300 Fatah members under house arrest, exposing them to Israeli air strikes.
Other Fatah members were kept in Hamas prisons during the war, which also endangered their lives, the statement said.Fatah said it preferred to remain silent toward the Hamas “crimes” during the war out of keenness to preserve Palestinian unity.
Fatah also accused Hamas of confiscating food and medicine sent to the Gaza Strip from the West Bank and other countries. It said Hamas distributed the aid among its men in mosques and sold some of it in the black market.
But Abbas’s big problem with Hamas is that the Shin Bet recently
uncovered a Hamas plot to overthrow him in the West Bank – repeating their 2007
coup against Fatah in Gaza.
According to the Jerusalem Post:
A large-scale Hamas terrorist formation in the West Bank and Jerusalem planned to destabilize the region through a series of deadly terrorist attacks in Israel and then topple the Fatah-ruled Palestinian Authority, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) said Monday.
The Shin Bet announcement was a follow to The Jerusalem Postfirst exclusively breaking the story regarding the busting and indicting of Hamas's West Bank leader, dozens of his operatives and a massive plot to recreate Hamas's West Bank infrastructure on August 7.
The plot was orchestrated by overseas Hamas operatives headquartered in Turkey and centered on a string of mass-casualty terrorist attacks on Israeli targets, the Shin Bet added.
The end goal was to destabilize the Palestinian territories and use the instability to carry out a military coup, overthrowing the government of PA President Mahmoud Abbas.
The plot was orchestrated by overseas Hamas operatives headquartered in Turkey and centered on a string of mass-casualty terrorist attacks on Israeli targets, the Shin Bet added.
The end goal was to destabilize the Palestinian territories and use the instability to carry out a military coup, overthrowing the government of PA President Mahmoud Abbas.
The plot was orchestrated by overseas Hamas operatives headquartered in Turkey and centered on a string of mass-casualty terrorist attacks on Israeli targets, the Shin Bet added.
The end goal was to destabilize the Palestinian territories and use the instability to carry out a military coup, overthrowing the government of PA President Mahmoud Abbas.
Understandably, Abbas has been pretty pissed off at Hamas ever since the
Shin Bet shared its evidence of this plot. But really, no serious observer of
Palestinian politics ever placed much faith in the supposed Fatah-Hamas unity
deal to start with.
For starters, there’s no realistic hope for stability when each Palestinian
political party has its own army. Indeed, the last “unity government” with
Fatah and Hamas ended with Hamas’s bloody 2007 coup in Gaza. As Time magazine reported,
back on June 12, 2007:
Hamas and Fatah may have passed the point of no return: The unprecedented viciousness of the renewed fighting between the rival Palestinian factions in Gaza makes any new cease-fire difficult to envisage; this time, it may be a fight to the death.
Since the new clashes erupted on Sunday, gangs have tossed their enemies alive off 15-story buildings, shot down one another's children, and burst into hospitals to finish off wounded foes lying helplessly in bed. The revenge motive alone could now be enough to sustain the civil war.
The fighters of Hamas are better organized and motivated than those of President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah organization, and by the second day of fighting they had seized the advantage, flushing Fatah militants out of security posts and installations throughout the Gaza Strip. Doctors reported that in the last 24 hours, 21 Palestinians have been killed and another 120 wounded in the fighting.
Both Hamas and Fatah have vowed to kill each other's political and military leaders, and have tried to do so with a vengance. Twice in the past 48 hours, Fatah members shelled the home of Hamas leader and Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh. He and his family were unhurt.
It did not help the morale of Fatah gunmen that their senior commander, Mohammed Dahlan — a sharp-suited favorite of the Israelis and the U.S. — slipped out of Gaza as soon as the fighting started. Soon afterwards, Hamas members cornered a top Dahlan commander, Jamal Abud a-Jediyan, near his home and pumped 45 bullets into him. One Fatah officer, Colonel Nasser Khaldi, contacted by a news agency, complained: "There is a weakness of our leaders. Hamas is just taking over our positions. There are no orders."
Meanwhile, President Abbas, who remains a safe distance away from the fury of Gaza at his fortress home in the West Bank city of Ramallah, has accused Hamas — his partner in a short-lived unity government — of trying to stage a coup.
And within a couple days of this report, it became clear Hamas
was not just trying; it succeeded in overthrowing Fatah in Gaza. And everyone
who knows anything about Palestinian politics, knows that, given the chance,
Hamas will take over the West Bank the same way.
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