Wednesday, October 04, 2006

The Palestinian turf war - the `families' are shooting it out to see who's boss


The Beast continues to eat itself,inch by inch.

For the last few weeks, the Palestinian areas in Gaza and on the West Bank have been experiencing a turf war, gangland style for final control of those pawns collectively known as the Palestinians and all those lovely aid dollars.

As regular members of Joshua's Army know, this has been going on for a while, but at a fairly low intensity - a hit here, a hit there, an office burning down in Ramallah, a staged `protest in Gaza...only now, its ramped up considerably.

Originally, as I reported here, Arafat II Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah faction had a sitdown with Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and came up with a deal to parcel out the spoils with a so-called `unity government'.

That ended when Abbas, fresh from his meeting with President Bush and the EU overreached himself and began to put the squeeze on Hamas, using hit squads loyal to Gaza gang kingpin Muhammed Dahlan to take out members of the Hamas mob.

Hamas responded with a major pushback, the assasination of Jad Tayeh, Abbas' top intelligence officer and a senior figure in Fatah's Palestinian intelligence services, killing him and four bodyguards.

The Hamas `security forces' then went after the WAFA press office and even went after the Fatah death squads; in addition to killing 3 squad members, they took at least 30 officers prisoner including the squad’s commander, Sifwat Rahami, who was dragged screaming from his home. Two of his officers ran to Sinai via the Rafah Crossing and headed for Cairo. And the bodyguards of several Palestinian Fatah police chiefs were snatched, leaving them and their families unprotected.

In Ramallah, the Fatah goombahs were limited to shooting up and destroying what's left of Ismail Haniyeh's office as a retaliation..which means very litle since he can't even cross over from Gaza!

The `Unity talks' have collapsed and the body count is starting to mount up.

Abbas could, according to Palestinian law, dissolve the government and call for new elections. I have a feeling Hamas wouldn't go along with that in the least.

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