Mutant/GSA trainee
Joined: 15 Oct 2004
Posts: 81
Location: Romania
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By Cynthia Johnston [Reuters]
GAZA (Reuters) - Palestinian policemen stormed into Gaza's parliament building on Monday to demand a crackdown on militants, and deputies urged President Mahmoud Abbas to sack the cabinet for failing to stamp out armed chaos in Gaza.
The two challenges highlighted Abbas's uphill struggle to impose law and order in Gaza to make it the proving ground of a future Palestinian state after Israel's withdrawal of settlers and soldiers was completed last month.
"We are on the verge of civil war if the situation remains out of control," said Qaddoura Fares, a reformist legislator with Abbas's mainstream Fatah movement.
Legislators largely endorsed a parliamentary committee's report demanding Abbas form a new government within two weeks or face a no-confidence vote, shortly after policemen disrupted the session in fury over the killing of a commander by Hamas gunmen.
The protesters said security services were badly outgunned by militant groups like Hamas and that the Palestinian Authority seemed to lack the will to impose order. Abbas, citing a risk of civil war, says he wants to co-opt, not try to crush, militants.
"We want the Palestinian Authority to take a stand on Hamas. Hamas has more arms and ammunitions than the police. Our blood is flowing for the Authority and they are not doing anything," one protesting officer told Reuters.
There was no shooting in the building but shots were fired outside the compound. One policeman entered the chamber, briefly interrupting the session, before he and his comrades withdrew.
There were no reports of casualties in the incident, which took place while Abbas was in Gaza but not in the building.
"IRRESPONSIBLE CHAOS"
"What is happening is chaos and irresponsible," Abbas said on Palestinian television on Monday. "People are saying this is a test for a Palestinian state. If we continue on this path these people will say we don't deserve one."
He said he would use all means to subdue militants.
A no-confidence motion would force Abbas to name a new government. His own post is safe because he was elected by popular vote in January.
The Gaza lawmakers were participating by video-link in a debate by parliament at its headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah on whether to endorse a committee's motion to "start no-confidence procedures against the cabinet."
Signaling public discontent with lawlessness, legislators voted 43 to five, with five abstentions, to call on Abbas to "form a government that is capable of delivering in its tasks (and) to fire all directors of security services who failed to fulfil their duties and appoint new ones."
Palestinian police said Sunday's fighting began when a Gaza police patrol pulled over a carload of Hamas gunmen who were flouting a new ban on the public display of weapons agreed to by political leaders of the various militant factions.
A police commander and two civilian bystanders were killed in street fighting between policemen and Hamas gunmen. Fifty people were wounded, including children, when militants tried to storm a police station shortly afterwards.
"The president is absolutely concerned and is following this situation closely," Abbas adviser Diana Bbuttu told Reuters in reference to the angry police protest.
Hamas, whose leading role in a revolt against Israel turned its thousands of gunmen into folk heroes to many Palestinians, is defying Abbas in a power struggle whose stakes have risen since Israelis departed Gaza after 38 years of occupation.
Abbas wants to embark on a U.S.-devised peace "road map" to a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank. But Hamas rejects a negotiated solution and vows to destroy the Jewish state.
Militants say a shaky eight-month-old ceasefire will fall apart if Israel continues to expand larger settlements in the West Bank, the heartland of the state sought by Palestinians.
Israel's avowed determination never to cede such settlements under any peace accord has complicated Abbas's efforts to swing hardline factions behind peacemaking, his aides say.
(Writing by Mark Heinrich in Jerusalem, additional reporting by Mohammed Assadi in Ramallah and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza) |
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