Gaza today saw rival armies fielded by Mahmoud Abbas Fatah faction and the Hamas Government, in direct defiance of Abbas orders.
This comes in the wake of two hits on Hamas kingpins in the last couple of days by `unknown assailants'. Oddly enough, Israel radio reported that the gangland style hits were apparently a case of mistaken identity by the killers, who sought to avenge the killing of their comrades a day earlier by targeting members of Fatah, but mistakenly shot members of their own organization!
Interior Minister Saeed Seyam declared a Hamas-led, 3,000-member police force operational under the leadership of Gaza gangboss Jamal Semhadana as reported here. The `security units' under Semhadana’s orders are not only thugs and gunmen from his his own Popular Resistance Committees, but include units from Hamas’s military wing Ezz-e-Din al-Qassam.
Semhadana is a long time Gaza fixture and was implicated in the execution of three CIA operatives in Gaza under Arafat's orders.
The first action of the new Hamas army was to keep the peasants in line. According to witnesses, dozens of the fighters used clubs and rifles to quell a peaceful protest of jobless teachers, moments after they hit the streets.
Abbas' faction has gotten smething of a new lease on life thanks to heavy investment by the US and Britain, who are paying the tab for Abbas' security unit Force 17 and others.
Which will go on,I suppose, until they turn all the guns they gotten from the Americans on Israel, like last time.
Abbas has sent his own forces into Gaza to confront the new Hamas army, and both sides apparently have sqaured off in both Gaza City and Khan Younis.
Hopefully at point blank range and with clear fields of fire.
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