ChristiansUnite Forums

Palestinian Prime Minister Haniyeh Returns to Gaza Without Funds Raised Abroad

Thursday, December 14, 2006

RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Gunfire erupted at the Egypt-Gaza border late Thursday shortly after Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh crossed into Gaza, witnesses and officials said.

Haniyeh's convoy sped away from the scene and it appeared the prime minister was unharmed, witnesses said.

Sources said Haniyeh was not carrying any of the money — as much as $35 million — Israel used as a pretense to close the border crossing for fear that it could be used to fund terror activities.

Violence between Hamas gunmen and Fatah-allied guards broke out at the Rafah border crossing soon after Israel announced it was to be closed.

More than two dozen people were hurt.

Haniyeh cut short a trip abroad to return to Gaza in a bid to quell the infighting between Hamas and Fatah. The violence showed no signs of slowing Thursday, as pro-Fatah Palestinian officers arrested a Hamas-linked militant in the killing of three small children of a Fatah security chief. The militant's allies retaliated by kidnapping a security officer.

Thursday's gunbattle erupted after Hamas militants, angry that Israel was preventing Haniyeh from returning to Gaza, stormed the border terminal.

The pro-Fatah Presidential Guard, responsible for securing the area, opened fire, setting off a gunfight. Terrified travelers ran for cover, some carrying their luggage. Crying women and children hid behind walls and nearby taxis outside, while the European monitors whom police the crossing fled. Two Hamas militants were wounded in the gunfight.

The Hamas militants, chanting "God is Great, let's liberate this place" took over the arrival hall, and the border guards escorted the European monitors to safety. In the chaos of the attack, two loud explosions rocked the border area, and security officials said militants had blown a hole in the border fence about one kilometer (half a mile) from the terminal.

Late Thursday, hundreds of Hamas forces were patrolling the border area as Presidential Guards nervously looked on. But as Egyptian officials negotiated with the Europeans to reopen the border, impatient Hamas gunmen angry over the delays re-entered the area and began firing across the border. Egyptian officials said troops fired in the air to keep Palestinians from crossing.

The rampage destroyed furniture and computer equipment inside the terminal and plunged the area into darkness. Hospital officials said 27 people were wounded, two seriously.

Under a U.S.-brokered agreement, the border can only operate in the presence of European monitors. Thursday's unrest was likely to strain the deal, which turned over control of the crossing to the Palestinians last year after four decades of Israeli control.

Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz, working with the EU monitors, had ordered the border closed to prevent Haniyeh from bringing in tens of millions of dollars he raised during a tour of Muslim countries, security officials said.

A senior Israeli security official said they were not trying to block Haniyeh's entry, only to keep out the money. The official said Israel had information the money would be used to strengthen Hamas or fund terror attacks, but he declined to provide further details. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter with the press.

A Palestinian official said Haniyeh was carrying $35 million he raised during his recent trip, which included stops in Syria and Iran.

European officials said there had been an agreement for the money to be deposited into an Egyptian bank account, but it was unclear if the money had been deposited.

Haniyeh departed Gaza on Nov. 28 for what was supposed to be a month-long trip to the Muslim world, with a main goal to raise money for his government.

The Palestinian Authority has been crippled by international economic sanctions that have left it unable to pay full salaries to its 165,000 workers. Israel and Western donor nations cut off hundreds of millions of dollars for the government after Hamas won legislative elections early this year, demanding the terrorist group renounce violence and recognize Israel.

Hamas has rejected the demands and instead turned to Iran and other Muslim countries for help. Hamas officials have physically delivered more than $50 million to Gaza this year — far short of the government's needs.

Since Haniyeh left, the situation in Gaza has only worsened.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, of Fatah, has been trying to persuade Hamas to join his more moderate party in a coalition government in hopes of lifting the sanctions. But talks between the sides broke down late last month.

Tensions further heightened after Abbas threatened to call new elections, drawing charges from Hamas that he is plotting a coup. Abbas is scheduled to deliver a major speech outlining his plan on Saturday.

The latest violence broke out early this week when unknown gunmen riddled the car of a Fatah security officer, killing his three young sons. Fatah accused Hamas of carrying out the shooting — a charge Hamas denied. The officer, apparently the target of the attack, was not in the car at the time.

On Wednesday, gunmen in the southern Gaza Strip ambushed a prominent Hamas commander and killed him in an execution-style slaying outside a courthouse. Hamas accused a Fatah "death squad" of being behind the killing.

Palestinian Prime Minister Haniyeh Returns to Gaza Without Funds Raised Abroad (http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,236444,00.html)

Hamas Thrives   
By P. David Hornik
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 13, 2006

Monday morning in Gaza City masked gunmen waiting outside a school fired automatic rifles into a car and killed three brothers, Salam, Ahmed, and Osama Ba’lousheh, aged four, seven, and nine. Their driver was also killed and their bodyguard was wounded.

As for why three young boys on their way to school would need a bodyguard, their father, Baha Ba’lousheh, is a senior Fatah operative in Gaza who apparently took part in a crackdown on Hamas in 1996. The gunmen are assumed to have been from Hamas, which had reportedly been sending Ba’lousheh death threats and tried to assassinate him a few months ago.   

In the preceding move in the Hamas-Fatah feud, on Sunday there was an assassination attempt in Gaza on Hamas interior minister Said Siam. Hamas appears to have the upper hand: the Aksa Martyrs Brigades of Fatah, which called the killing of Ba’lousheh’s sons an “ugly massacre,” also charged Hamas with killing 78 Fatah members in the last few years.

Indeed, the whole Fatah establishment erupted in horror and seemed suddenly to discover the heinousness of child murder. Former security minister Muhammad Dahlan—believed to have been behind an attack on an Israeli school bus in Gaza in November 2000 that killed two teachers and severely wounded many children, including three siblings who needed leg amputations—said the attack on the Ba’lousheh children was a “despicable crime” that reminded him of massacres by Algerian Islamists during the 1990s.

And Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas—who was Yasser Arafat’s henchman for decades, and has been coronated a “moderate” because of utilitarian criticisms of Palestinian terror while almost never condemning it morally—reacted to the incident by declaring Tuesday a day of mourning throughout the PA. This contrasts with the PA’s many spontaneous celebrations after massacres of Israeli civilians—or, for that matter, American ones on September 11, 2001.

Meanwhile, Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh capped off a successful four-day visit to Tehran with an Iranian pledge of $250 million in aid to the PA. The Authority, widely described as “cash-strapped” and “desperate” under the Hamas regime, is staying afloat with help from Iran and various other friends.

As the International Monetary Fund noted in a report last October, in April-September this year Arab and EU funding to the PA came to $420 million compared to $230 million in the same period last year. The EU, formally “boycotting” the Hamas government, keeps funneling funds to the PA through “bypass” mechanisms—thereby not only absolving the PA populace for electing Hamas last year but continuing to reward it with aid levels that few peoples enjoy.

Another source of Hamas monies is the smuggling of large sums from various sources through the Rafah crossing from Sinai to Gaza, where “monitors” from the same EU—installed there a year ago amid much pomp and praise and the blessing of Condoleezza Rice—can’t seem to get up the energy to do anything about it.

For his part, the head of Israel’s Shin Bet counterintelligence agency, Yuval Diskin, told the Israeli cabinet on Sunday that Hamas faces no substantial opposition in the PA and that Abbas and Fatah are too weak to stop its gradual takeover of the PA security forces. Yossi Baidatz of Military Intelligence added that Hamas is greatly benefiting from the ceasefire agreed to by the Olmert government three weeks ago, continuing to smuggle weapons from Sinai while building up its forces.   

So, less than a year after being elected and taking office, Hamas is enjoying the best of all worlds. It can commit acts of extreme savagery—even against Palestinians, even Palestinian children—knowing that the same Kofi Annan, European ministers, and so on who get outraged by an Israeli accident will yawn if they notice at all. A Sunni fundamentalist movement, it can get adopted by the same Shiite fundamentalist regime that is helping foment severe Sunni-Shiite strife elsewhere in the Middle East.

While being purportedly “boycotted” by the EU for which Hamas’s genocidal covenant and open calls for Israel’s destruction are supposedly going too far, Hamas can keep enjoying aid infusions to its fiefdom that—even if they don’t actually pass through its own hands—obviously have the same effect of propping up its populace while leaving Hamas itself free to keep pouring its own funds into weapons and troops. And Hamas has been granted the huge luxury of an—in effect—totally open Sinai-Gaza border through which all that it could desire—money, munitions, operatives, Syrian and Iranian military advisers, et al.—can enter freely.

Hamas can also keep raining rockets on Israel and then, whenever Israel fights back to some substantial degree, sue for a ceasefire and invariably obtain it, reinforcing itself for the next ever-more-lethal round.

“All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,” said Edmund Burke. In Hamas’s case, that can be revised to: All that is needed for evil to triumph is for enough fellow Arabs and Muslims to aid it and enough cynical or stupid Westerners to join in aiding it or do nothing.

Hamas Thrives (http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=25976)