Palestinian Leader Assails Hamas, Calling Unity Pact Into Question
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Version 0 of 1. JERUSALEM — President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority lambasted his faction’s longtime rival, Hamas, at a meeting of the Arab League over the weekend, deepening doubts about the durability of their reconciliation pact and potentially complicating reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. Mr. Abbas started a speech to Arab foreign ministers in Cairo on Sunday discussing the bitter history of his Fatah faction’s fight with Hamas, the Islamist movement that dominates Gaza, but after a minute the meeting was closed to the news media. On Saturday night, he had accused Hamas of running a shadow government in Gaza and of illegally executing scores of Palestinians, according to Arab news reports. “If Hamas won’t accept a Palestinian state with one government, one law and one gun,” he told journalists and scholars, “then there won’t be any partnership between us.” Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, denounced the Saturday-night statements as “unjustified” and “unjust” in a Facebook post on Sunday. “We call on Abbas to stop talking through the media and give a chance for the dialogue and understanding between the two movements,” he said. But analysts said this summer’s bloody battle between Israel and Hamas, and the Egyptian-brokered cease-fire that stopped it on Aug. 26, only made such dialogue more difficult. “We knew all along that this deal is just on paper,” Khalil Shikaki, a political scientist and pollster in the West Bank, said of the reconciliation, “and Abbas seems to be on the verge of allowing it to fall apart.” The Fatah-dominated Palestine Liberation Organization, which Mr. Abbas heads, signed a deal with Hamas in April to end their seven-year schism and reunite the West Bank and Gaza under one government. Mr. Abbas swore in a new slate of ministers on June 2, but they have yet to take control in Gaza. Though the Hamas ministers there stepped aside, their deputies still largely run day-to-day operations. Neither Mr. Abbas nor his prime minister, Rami Hamdallah, has visited Gaza since. That has led to harsh criticism from Hamas leaders, Gaza residents and even the new government’s Gaza-based minister of public works and housing, who so far has nothing to offer the thousands who lost their homes to Israeli attacks. “Why is there a shadow government in Gaza?” asked Mkhaimar Abusada, a political scientist at Al Azhar University in Gaza City. “Because the unity government has been absent. There is no trust whatsoever between Fatah and Hamas. Both parties feel that reconciliation is a tactic by the other party for the time being, but neither one is interested in reconciliation as a strategic move.” Two of Hamas’s main motivations for reconciling were securing payment for its 43,000 government employees, and fully reopening Gaza’s Rafah crossing into Egypt. Neither has happened. Egypt, Israel and the United States have indicated that the crossings must be policed by Mr. Abbas’s forces, and that reconstruction can happen only under his watch; many of the international donors who are expected to fund the rebuilding deem Hamas a terrorist organization. Ismail Haniya, Gaza’s top Hamas political leader, threatened on Sunday to renew fire against Israel on Sept. 25 if restrictions on travel and trade were not lifted. But in Cairo, Mr. Abbas was trying to build momentum for a new diplomatic initiative in which the international community would demand a three-year deadline to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands — a strategy Hamas leaders have dismissed as more of the same. A poll published last week by Mr. Shikaki’s Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research indicated that Mr. Haniya would trounce Mr. Abbas if there was a presidential election. Mr. Abbas’s “popularity is the worst since he assumed office,” Mr. Shikaki said, while “public support for Hamas is the highest since we have known Hamas.” He continued: “Abbas’s threat with regard to reconciliation is serious in the sense that he is saying, ‘I will leave this in your hands — you started this war, you deal with the consequences.’ Gaza suffers the consequences; Palestinian national unity suffers the consequences. I think this comes out of anger and frustration. Abbas seems to have decided he has had enough and he wants to blow everything up.” Israeli leaders who had condemned the reconciliation welcomed the renewed rockiness. “He has to decide between an alliance with the terror organization Hamas, that anyway is turning on him and exploiting every weakness to remove him from his areas of power, or to choose an alliance with Israel that will require him to get to a compromise,” Tzachi Hanegbi, a deputy foreign minister, said in a radio interview. “He must break it off from this false unity and return to dialogue with us.” |