GAZA CITY, 6 January 2007 — Unidentified gunmen shot dead a mosque imam hours after he delivered a sermon in the Gaza Strip yesterday calling for an end to fierce factional fighting between Hamas and Fatah.
The man’s shooting in central Gaza followed an announcement by Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas that he and President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah had agreed to keep rival gunmen off Gaza’s streets after clashes in which eight people were killed.
Tension was high across the coastal strip as thousands of Palestinians loyal to Fatah took part in funeral marches for a commander killed in a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades fired by Hamas gunmen on Thursday.
Brushing aside Haniyeh’s plea for calm, Fatah issued a statement in Gaza: “Blood for blood and aggression for aggression... and all the sons of the movement should retaliate to each aggression openly.”
The imam, who was in a car when the gunmen opened fire, was not affiliated to any faction. No group claimed responsibility for the shooting, which occurred after Friday prayers at a mosque in the Maghazi refugee camp.
At one of the funeral marches, members of Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades threatened to assassinate Foreign Minister Mahmoud Al-Zahar and Interior Minister Saeed Seyam of Hamas. “Zahar and Seyam, you have to leave Gaza. We will tear your bodies to pieces,” an Al-Aqsa member shouted at the crowd.
On Thursday night, Hamas-controlled militants and police forces stormed the house of senior Fatah leader Sufian Abu Zaida in northern Gaza Strip, smashing furniture.
Factional fighting has surged in Gaza and the occupied West Bank since Abbas challenged the ruling Hamas faction by calling for early parliamentary and presidential elections after talks on forming a unity government failed.
Haniyeh said after late-night emergency talks with Abbas, their first meeting in two months, that they had agreed to “withdraw all gunmen from the streets and deploy police forces to keep law and order.”
Abbas made no public comment, but a diplomat who attended the talks confirmed an agreement had been reached. Similar pacts in the past have quickly been shattered by violence.
In internal fighting on Thursday, Fatah gunmen killed a policeman loyal to Hamas. Hamas gunmen, blaming the shooting on bodyguards of Col. Mohammed Ghareeb of the Preventive Security Service, besieged his home in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya, killing Ghareeb and six of his men and wounding his wife.
Some Fatah gunmen expressed anger at Abbas for not sending forces to save Ghareeb, who had pleaded for help on television.
Amid the power struggle in the Palestinian territories, the Bush administration has decided to provide $86 million to strengthen security forces loyal to Abbas.
The US money will be used to “assist the Palestinian Authority presidency in fulfilling PA commitments under the road map to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism and establish law and order in the West Bank and Gaza,” according to a US government document obtained by Reuters.
