3 Palestinians dead, 52 hurt in Hamas-Fatah clashes in Gaza

Three Palestinians were killed Sunday in Gaza gunbattles between militants from the ruling Hamas party and security personnel loyal to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, hospital officials said.

Militiamen from Hamas used guns, antitank launchers and grenades to break up police protests over unpaid government salaries, touching off gunbattles.

Dozens of supporters from Abbas' Fatah Party retaliated by ransacking and torching the empty Cabinet building in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The Fatah supporters had earlier marched through the city, the seat of the Palestinian government, burning tires and shouting, "Hamas, out, out."

A 15-year-old boy and a member of Abbas' presidential bodyguard were among the dead. At least 52 people were injured, including three schoolchildren and a cameraman for the Arab satellite TV station Al-Arabiya, hospital officials said. At least 15 of the wounded were civilians.

Haaretz

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"The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are killing each other. They are behaving as expected at the end of the extended experiment called "what happens when you imprison 1.3 million human beings in an enclosed space like battery hens."

These are the steps in the experiment: Imprison (since 1991); remove the prisoners' usual means of livelihood; seal off all outlets to the outside world, nearly hermetically; destroy existing means of livelihood by preventing the entry of raw materials and the marketing of goods and produce; prevent the regular entry of medicines and hospital supplies; do not bring in fresh food for weeks on end; prevent, for years, the entry of relatives, professionals, friends and others, and allow thousands of people - the sick, heads of families, professionals, children - to be stuck for weeks at the locked gates of the Gaza Strip's only entry/exit.

Steal hundreds of millions of dollars (customs and tax revenues collected by Israel that belong to the Palestinian treasury), so as to force the nonpayment of the already low salaries of most government employees for months; present the firing of homemade Qassam rockets as a strategic threat that can only be stopped by harming women, children and the old; fire on crowded residential neighborhoods from the air and the ground; destroy orchards, groves and fields.


Dispatch planes to frighten the population with sonic booms; destroy the new power plant and force the residents of the closed-off Strip to live without electricity for most of the day for a period of four months, which will most likely turn into a full year - in other words, a year without refrigeration, electric fans, television, lights to study and read by; force them to get by without a regular supply of water, which is dependent on the electricity supply.

It is the good old Israeli experiment called "put them into a pressure cooker and see what happens," and this is one of the reasons why this is not an internal Palestinian matter."

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more resonance if Hass ever recognized that Palestinians share some responsibility, particularly in the case of Palestinian on Palestinian violence. And the tensions between Fatah and Hamas and other factional violence, pre-date the Israelis recent, and deplorable actions that have turned Gaza into a nightmare.