GAZA CITY, May 17: Moderate Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas on Wednesday ordered the security forces to deploy in strength to impose his authority after the Hamas-led government deployed a rival force.
“President Abbas has ordered the members of all the security forces to deploy as rapidly as possible in Palestinian towns to restore order and ensure security,” the official said.
“Mr Abbas also told security force personnel to refuse any orders delivered by any authority but his own.”
Members of a new security force recruited by the Hamas-led government fanned out across Gaza earlier in the day in a deployment which further raised tensions between the Islamists and Mr Abbas’s mainstream Fatah faction.
Interior Minister Saeed Seyam declared the security service operational after the killings of two Hamas militants by gunmen in Gaza in the past two days. In fresh violence in the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces shot dead two Islamic Jihad militants.
About 30 members of the new force, armed and wearing military fatigues, patrolled the market of Nusseirat refugee camp, a Hamas stronghold in the Gaza Strip. Some wore headbands emblazoned with the name ‘Qassam’, Hamas’s armed wing.
Witnesses said members of the force also deployed along main roads, including the north-south Gaza highway, and some were on mobile patrol.
Mr Abbas, whose Fatah party was defeated by Hamas in a January election, has rejected the new 3,000-member force which the militant group has said would comprise its own fighters and gunmen from allied factions.
In what appeared to be a rival show of force, Mr Abbas deployed hundreds of civil police in southern Gaza within hours. One officer said the deployment in Khan Younis was ordered to restore calm after gunfights between Hamas and Fatah loyalists.
Mr Seyam told reporters the Hamas-led contingent would tackle the ‘chaos and anarchy and increasing assaults on our people’.
Just hours after Mr Seyam’s announcement, members of the force ejected students from education ministry offices in the Gaza town of Khan Younis, where they were protesting exam fees.
Tawfiq Abu Khoussa, a Fatah spokesman, called on Mr Seyam to ‘retract a hasty decision that may lead our people to catastrophe’. Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh later met leaders of his Hamas faction and Fatah to try to calm tensions.
Three gunmen were killed and a dozen people wounded in violence between Mr Abbas’s long-dominant Fatah and Hamas last week fuelled by a power struggle between his loyalists and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh’s supporters.
Mr Seyam said attacks by ‘armed gangs’ were part of ‘a plot to destabilise the Palestinian territories and match the pressure being applied on the government’.
Western donor nations, demanding Hamas recognise Israel and accept existing interim peace agreements, have cut off funding to the Palestinian Authority, leaving 165,000 government employees unpaid since March.
Hundreds of government workers blocked the main road in the West Bank city of Ramallah, demanding their wages. “Haniyeh, we have no bread at home,” members of crowd shouted.—AFP/Reuters
