Deadly gunbattles rage in Gaza as Israel strikes
Pastor Dale Morgan
Wednesday May 16, 9:57 PM
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Deadly gunbattles rage in Gaza as Israel strikes*
Fourteen Palestinans were killed in Gaza on Wednesday as raging
gunbattles between rival factions kept terrified residents indoors and
threatened to plunge the Palestinians into a new political crisis.
It was the bloodiest of four days of fighting that has renewed fears of
a full-scale civil war in Gaza and has left the fragile government
uniting president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah party and the Islamist Hamas
teetering just two months after it assumed office.
In a move that could further spiral the internecine violence that has
killed 38 people in four days, an Israeli aircraft bombed a Hamas
training camp in Gaza, killing two people, after a barrage of militant
rockets fired from the territory, medics and witnesses said.
Gaza militants have been launching rockets against Israel since the
start of the latest bout of Palestinian infighting on Sunday, with 23
landing inside the Jewish state, wounding two civilians and causing damage.
The bloodshed has turned Gaza City into a ghost town, with stores
shuttered, schools closed and civilians cowering indoors, avoiding
walking in front of windows for fear of being hit by a stray bullet.
"Today we live in fear," said Um Muhammad, mother of six. "Even during
the Israeli occupation the situation wasn't this terrible."
As international calls for a halt to the violence mounted, Abbas and
Hamas's exiled political supremo Khaled Meshaal agreed to work to halt
the bloodshed which is undermining the unity government and threatening
peace efforts.
Palestinian information minister Mustafa Barghuti told AFP that Abbas
and Meshaal agreed in a telephone called "on the necessity to put an end
to the bloody events between Hamas and Fatah in Gaza."
Deputy prime minister Azzam al-Ahmad told AFP that Abbas could declare a
state of emergency in the territory, which has been plunged into
economic chaos by an Israeli and Western aid boycott imposed since Hamas
took office last year.
Abbas was due to travel Gaza on Thursday after a meeting of the
Palestine Liberation Organisation in Ramallah.
Wednesday's bout of violence erupted just hours after the rival factions
announced for a third time that they had agreed a truce late Tuesday.
Five Fatah men were killed in a brazen attack by Hamas on the Gaza home
of the pro-Fatah Palestinian security supremo, Rashid Abu Shbak.
Gunmen fired grenades, mortar rounds and anti-tank shells in three hours
of fighting that left five of Shbak's bodyguards dead. Shbak himself was
not in the house and escaped unscathed.
Later, eight people, including one civilian, were killed when Hamas
fighters fired anti-tank shells on a Fatah vehicle carrying Islamic
Resistance Movement detainees, they said.
The bloodshed also threatens to torpedo any efforts to revive Middle
East peacemaking after Arab states adopted a revived peace plan offering
normal ties with Israel if it withdraws from land occupied in war in 1967.
Thirty-eight people, the vast majority of them Fatah loyalists, have
been killed since simmering factional tensions boiled over into a new
bout of internecine violence on Sunday. The toll has included two civilians.
About 100 people have been wounded.
In December and January, about 100 Palestinians died in factional
fighting in the unruly coastal strip, and the unity cabinet which took
office on March 17 was supposed to put an end to the bloodshed.
But tensions between the two rivals continued to simmer, stoked by
disagreements last week over a US security plan for the region and
boiled over when a Hamas loyalist was killed by a Fatah man on Sunday.
The bloodshed sparked calls by the United Nations and the United States
for a halt to the bloodshed.
Western allies in the Arab world voiced deep concern, with Jordanian
King Abdullah II warning that the fighting will rebound "on the future
of Palestine."
In Riyadh, leaders of the six pro-Western Gulf states called on the
feuding factions to return to a power-sharing deal hammered out under
Saudi sponsorship in the Muslim holy city of Mecca in February.
In a statement released after a consultative meeting of their Gulf
Cooperation Council on Tuesday, the six governments -- Bahrain, Kuwait,
Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates -- condemned the
"deplorable events" in Gaza.