Violent protests follow Hamas’ upset victory
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – Street clashes erupted in the Gaza Strip on Friday in the wake of the militant Islamist group Hamas’ overwhelming victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections, raising the specter of a wider outbreak of violence during the coming transition of power.
Thousands of activists from the defeated Fatah movement torched cars outside the Palestinian Parliament building in the center of Gaza City, fired shots into the air and chanted angry slogans denouncing their own leaders, whom they blame for the party’s stunning loss after four decades of unchallenged rule.
Fatah-linked gunmen also marched menacingly past Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ villa in Gaza City, but he was not there at the time. He has remained at his West Bank headquarters in Ramallah since Wednesday’s election, which sent shock waves through the region and has imperiled prospects for the creation of a Palestinian state. Abbas spoke to reporters Friday, saying he would ask Hamas, as the holder of the majority of parliamentary seats, to form a government, but gave no timetable for his request.
“We are consulting and in contact with all the Palestinian groups and definitely, at the appropriate time, the biggest party will form the Cabinet,” Abbas said.
In a separate confrontation Friday near the town of Khan Younis in the south of Gaza, loyalists from Fatah and Hamas faced off in a battle that escalated from stone-throwing to an exchange of gunfire. Three people were reported injured.
The clashes were neither as large nor as lethal as other episodes of unrest that have gripped Gaza in recent months since Israeli forces unilaterally withdrew. But Friday’s tumult boded ill for a peaceful handover by Fatah of governing control – with all the material privileges it affords – to Hamas.
The Palestinian Authority, until now controlled by Fatah, has tens of thousands of men under arms in the various branches of its security forces. In addition, hundreds of rogue gunmen of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a violent militia, also consider themselves Fatah loyalists, but routinely use force and intimidation to demand jobs and other perquisites.
Public anger over corruption within the Palestinian Authority was a galvanizing factor behind Hamas’ victory, but many observers are warning that people who accumulated wealth and privilege under Fatah’s auspices are unlikely to give it up without a fight.
“It’s easy (for Palestinian voters) to say, ‘You are corrupt, and we are fed up with you,’ but it is harder to live by that slogan when the corrupt ruling class have an armed militia,” Amnon Danker, the editor-in-chief of the Israeli newspaper Maariv, wrote in a commentary in Friday’s editions.
Ideological differences between the secular-minded Fatah, which has sought an accord with Israel, and rigorously Islamist Hamas, which is sworn to the Jewish state’s destruction, also could boil over into confrontation in coming days and weeks.
Samir Mashrawi, one of the leaders of Friday’s street protests, lost what had been considered a safe parliamentary seat in his Gaza City district. Addressing the marchers, Mashrawi, who has ties with an offshoot of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, demanded the resignation of members of Fatah’s ruling Central Committee.
Other protesters have made death threats against the Fatah leadership if they enter into any kind of governing coalition with Hamas.
Fatah officials so far have rebuffed overtures to form a parliamentary alliance with Hamas, but Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said Friday he had asked for a meeting with Abbas in the next few days to discuss a “political partnership.”