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Strife in Palestine

The Palestinian national unity government set up under the terms of the Makkah agreement could collapse if President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Ismail Haniya do not succeed in their efforts to stop the fighting between Hamas and Fatah. Nearly 40 people, including many civilians, have died in the clashes since the second week of May. While Mr. Abbas and Mr. Haniya met on May 22, it is far from certain that the armed men belonging to their political groups will step back from the brink of a civil war. The conflict broke out when the Palestinian security services, made up mostly of Fatah loyalists, erected barricades in the Gaza Strip without consulting Hamas or getting the go-ahead from the neutral Interior Minister, Hani al-Qawasmeh. When the Executive Force and the Qassam Brigades, two militias run by the Islamist party, retaliated violently, other Fatah men came to the aid of their comrades. The latest round of fighting has exposed the structural weaknesses of the Palestinian Authority. Its uniformed security services have come under the nominal control of Hamas after it won the parliamentary election in January 2006. It was mainly because the commanding officers of these security services would not follow the orders of an Islamist minister that the facilitators of the Makkah agreement pushed the idea of appointing a neutral person to the post. The whole arrangement seems to have come unstuck when Mr. Abbas picked a die-hard Fatah man Mohammed Dahlan as his national security adviser.

As expected, Israel has jumped into the fray by carrying out a series of bomb attacks on Hamas targets — ostensibly because the Islamists fired rockets into its territory. It is possible that the Islamist party, adopting the tactics followed by Lebanon's Hizbollah in 2006, deliberately invited the Israeli attacks in order to rally the Palestinian masses to its side. A stronger government than that of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert might have examined other options before deciding to use violence. The governments of Egypt and Jordan could have been persuaded to use their influence over the Palestinian factions to quell the civil strife and stop the barrage of rockets. Instead, an Israeli government discredited by the Lebanon war chose a course of action guaranteed to make the situation worse — and divert attention from Palestine's internal political crisis. It is the responsibility of Palestinian leaders urgently to resolve this unfortunate crisis, which leads them nowhere and only weakens the resolve of the Palestinian people to focus on their real demands.

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