GAZA CITY, 14 February 2007 — Ismail Haniyeh was getting ready yesterday to resign as Palestinian prime minister at the helm of his Hamas government and form a unity Cabinet despite continued Western reluctance to lift a crippling aid boycott.
Almost a year after his first Cabinet ushered in unprecedented depression and political crisis, Haniyeh will be tasked tomorrow by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with forming the first Fatah-Hamas government.
“The prime minister’s resignation and appointment by decree to head the new government should happen during a meeting, probably Thursday, between Ismail Haniyeh and President Abbas,” said Haniyeh’s chief of staff, Mohammed Al-Madhun.
Before meeting Haniyeh, long considered Abbas’ nemesis, the president is to give a televised speech at midday tomorrow, his office said.
A power-sharing accord, signed in Makkah on Feb. 8, has been billed as a chance to end fierce factional fighting in which 100 people have been killed since December, win back Western aid and resume peace efforts.
But it remains to be seen whether Israel and the West will lift the debilitating political and economic boycott, or whether the new government will prove able to prevent further inter-Palestinian bloodshed.
Meanwhile, Palestinian faction Islamic Jihad yesterday threatened to attack US interests to avenge any harm inflicted on its leader after the United States put a five-million-dollar price on his head.
“Any harm to the secretary-general of Islamic Jihad will endanger American interests everywhere in the region,” Abu Ahmed, a spokesman for Jihad’s military wing, the Al-Quds Brigades, said in a statement.
On Monday, the United States offered five million dollar reward for the capture of Damascus-based Jihad leader Ramadan Abdullah Mohammad Shallah and a member of Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah militia, Mohammed Ali Hamadei. Both are on the FBI’s most-wanted terrorist list.
In another development, a Palestinian fighter was killed during a gunbattle with Israeli troops on the border with the Gaza Strip yesterday, Palestinians and the Israeli Army said. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades group, part of President Abbas’ Fatah faction, named the dead fighter as 20-year-old Mohammed Saeedi. Another Palestinian with him was wounded.
— With input from agencies
