Media coverage
Le Monde · 2011-04-14
The article argues that Palestinian political divisions were intertwined with the April escalation between Israel and Hamas, despite a fragile de facto truce after Palestinian casualties in Israeli strikes. It traces the sequence from Ismail Haniyeh’s invitation to Mahmoud Abbas to visit Gaza and the March 15 youth protest calling for Palestinian reunification, to the killing of two Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades members, Hamas’s unprecedented rocket and mortar response since Operation Cast Lead, and the subsequent stalling of reconciliation when Hamas military officials said they could not guarantee Abbas’s safety in Gaza.
The article argues that Palestinian political divisions were intertwined with the April escalation between Israel and Hamas, despite a fragile de facto truce after Palestinian casualties in Israeli strikes. It traces the sequence from Ismail Haniyeh’s invitation to Mahmoud Abbas to visit Gaza and t…
Ghazi Hamad, deputy foreign minister in the Hamas government, is indignant: “There were 20 dead and 120 wounded on the Palestinian side, a single Israeli wounded, and the Israelis would have people believe that they are the victims of terrorism!” The de facto truce, established on Sunday 10 April between the Jewish state and the Islamist groups in the Gaza Strip, was still holding on the morning of Thursday the 14th, but we will probably never know whether these new “martyrs” of the Palestinian cause, certainly killed during the IDF reprisals, were not also collateral victims of the disunity of the Palestinian movement.
The sequence of events that led to the deadliest Israeli-Palestinian clashes since the end of Operation Cast Lead, in January 2009, is troubling to say the least. On 16 March, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, had responded favorably to Ismail Haniyeh’s invitation to travel to Gaza. “I am ready to go there as early as tomorrow,” he had assured.
On 15 March, a massive demonstration was held in central Gaza City, organized following an unprecedented mobilization of Gaza’s youth. Officially, the shabab (“the youth”) are demanding the reunification of the Palestinian movement, deeply divided between Hamas and Fatah. In practice, it is also a challenge to the Hamas government, which reacted brutally. Also on 16 March, two militants from the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, were killed in an Israeli strike.
The Islamic Resistance Movement responded on 19 March with force unprecedented since Operation Cast Lead: some 45 shells and rockets rained down on Israel. This marked the beginning of a military escalation.
At the same time, the euphoria over Palestinian reconciliation quickly faded: on 26 March, several Hamas military officials made it known that they would not be able to guarantee Mr. Abbas’s security if he traveled to Gaza. From that point on, this “historic” visit was postponed indefinitely, even if, as Ghazi Hamad assures, “contacts on this matter are continuing.”
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Text © Le Monde — archived here with attribution to the source. — Machine translation for archival reference. — Original source