The Palestinian President and Prime Minister agreed on Friday to set aside hostility for the time being and withdraw their forces after a senior security commander and four of his bodyguards were killed in one of the bloodiest battles in weeks of internal fighting.
The President and the Prime Minister have been locked in a violent struggle for power.
Thursday’s violence in Gaza, coupled with an Israeli raid in the West Bank that killed four Palestinian civilians, forced Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas and President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah to hold emergency talks, despite the acrimonious accusations the two have traded in recent weeks.
“We are going to end all armed displays in the streets,” Haniyeh said after the meeting. Abbas did not comment.
Previous peace deals had quickly collapsed thanks to the political deadlock.
Hamas, the Islamic militants, controls the government but the moderate Abbas wields power as a separately elected President.
The emergency meeting between the competing President and the Prime |Minister took place a few hours after Colonel Mohammed Ghayeb, head of the Abbas-allied Preventive Security Service in northern Gaza, was killed when Hamas gunmen attacked his home with rockets and grenades.
The violent skirmish outside the house raged for much of the day in whichfour of Ghayeb’s guards and a Hamas gunman were killed. Over 30 people,including eight children and Ghayeb’s wife, were wounded.
Late on Thursday, Fatah militants had attacked Hamas offices and vehicles in several places in the West Bank.
It was earlier on Thursday that Israeli forces crashed into the West Bank town of Ramallah, the first major army raid since Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Abbas had agreed two weeks earlier to try to ease tensions between the two sides. In the two-hour raid, complete with heavy gun battles, dozens of cars were smashed and vegetable carts overturned. Four Palestinians lost their lives 20 others were wounded in the fighting.
Olmert, who met Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak a few hours after the raid, apologised for any civilian casualties but insisted that the operation was meant to protect Israel from terrorist attacks.
The Olmert-Mubarak summit, intended to promote new Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, was overshadowed by the violence.
At the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, the site of the summit, Mubarak condemned the raid and said “the security of Israel cannot be achieved through military force but by serious endeavours toward peace.”
Abbas remarked that Israel’s peace promises rang hollow in the light of the raid and demanded £2.5 million in compensation for the damage to shops and cars in Ramallah.
Israel’s Cabinet Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, a former defence minister, criticised the raid’s timing, saying: “I don’t think this operation should have been carried out on the day of a visit by the Israeli Prime Minister to a country in which we have a supreme strategic interest. Our relations with Egypt are more important to us than anything else.”
Israel was apparently targeting Rabih Hamed, who escaped with serious injuries. A news agency photographer too was critically wounded by the gunfire.Labels: International Politics |
