Cease-fire shaky as new gunfights rock Gaza
Armed clashes have flared again in the Gaza Strip as leaders of rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas struggle to enforce a cease-fire.
Sporadic bursts of gunfire and occasional explosions have echoed across the city centre’s deserted streets and shuttered shops as residents sheltered in their homes.
Leaders of the warring parties have met in Gaza City in a bid to bolster the unravelling cease-fire.
Before dawn, two mortar rounds slammed into the headquarters of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s elite presidential guard, just 100 metres from his seafront offices, a security source said.
Mortar shells and grenades were also fired at the nearby campus of the Al Azhar University, controlled by Mr Abbas’s Fatah faction.
But there are signs that the violence is easing, with the rivals beginning to withdraw their militants from the streets overnight, as stipulated by the cease-fire agreed on Friday by Mr Abbas and exiled Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal.
The fighting has been more subdued than in previous days, when 28 Palestinians were killed and around 260 wounded in the some of the fiercest clashes since the Islamist Hamas routed Fatah in parliamentary elections early last year. Crisis talks
Mr Abbas and Mr Meshaal are set to meet for crisis talks in the Muslim holy city of Mecca on Tuesday, hosted by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak says he remains confident the two could still strike a national unity deal despite the fighting.
“We are working towards a national unity government,” he said after talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Cairo on Saturday.
“It is about to be finished, unless there are any surprises.”
Fatah and Hamas have tried in vain for months to form a broad coalition acceptable to Western donors, who imposed a crippling aid freeze on the Palestinian Authority when the Islamist-led Government took power last March.
Representatives of the two sides met in Gaza on Saturday to renew their commitment to the truce - the second attempt at a cease-fire in a week.
But as violence continued, the rivals traded blame. Guards killed
Two members of Abbas’s elite presidential guard died on Sunday morning from wounds suffered during a Friday attack on their training camp in south Gaza City.
Late on Saturday, Hamas militants killed a Fatah security officer, a Palestinian security source said.
And in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, Hamas blamed Fatah militants for burning a book shop and supermarket owned by a prominent leader in the Islamist movement.
Meanwhile, Fatah militants in the West Bank town of Nablus released a kidnapped law professor who teaches at the city’s An-Najah Islamic University.
Fatah accused Hamas of failing to rein in its gunmen.
“The problem with Hamas is that the political leadership cannot control their militants on the ground,” spokesman Tawfiq Abu Khussa told AFP.
But Hamas spokesman Ismail Radwan fired back.
“It seems that there is a group of putschists who don’t want a truce,” he told AFP.
“We hold Fatah responsible for all that is happening.” UN warning
The United Nations has warned that the upsurge in violence is making it “extremely difficult for us to fulfil our humanitarian mandates”.
“The implications of this for a population already facing extreme hardship are grave,” it said.
Tuesday’s Abbas-Meshaal summit will be a second rare meeting for the two leaders after talks in Damascus on January 21 ended without a breakthrough.
That failure helped spark the latest clashes, which have killed 63 people since January 25.
The German chancellor, who is the current holder of the European Union’s rotating presidency, reiterated in Cairo on Saturday that the 27-member EU would only resume aid to the Palestinian Government if it renounced violence and recognised Israel and past peace deals - something Hamas has refused to do.
The EU, Russia, the UN and the United States reaffirmed these conditions at talks in Washington on Friday, although Russia again voiced criticism of the “counterproductive” policy.
- AFP