News outlets conveyed reports – beginning Saturday and extending through Monday – of increased tensions between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction and the Hamas terror organization, with Abbas slamming Hamas for, per Agence France Presse, ‘effectively running a parallel administration in Gaza’:
“We will not accept the situation with Hamas continuing as it is at the moment,” Abbas said in remarks published by official Palestinian news agency WAFA.
“We won’t accept a partnership with them if the situation continues like this in Gaza, where there is a shadow government… running the territory,” he said.
Abbas reportedly threatened to terminate the unity agreement the rival groups had agreed to earlier this year, telling journalists that “there won’t be any partnership” if “Hamas won’t accept a Palestinian state with one government.” Abbas had already last month lashed out against Hamas for failing to accept in July what were functionally the same ceasefire terms more than a month later, and top figures from his U.S.-backed Palestinian Authority (PA) have gone so far as to call on the terror group to acknowledge that it had lost.
Over the course of the 50-day hot conflict, dozens of terror tunnels running between Israel and the Gaza Strip were destroyed, several top Hamas commanders were killed in Israeli airstrikes, and roughly two-thirds of the group’s rocket arsenal was deployed or destroyed.
Meanwhile, the United Nations and the PA appealed to international donors, asking for hundreds of millions of dollars in aid for the rebuilding of the Gaza Strip. Palestinian Deputy Prime Minister Mohammed Mustafa noted that foreign governments were hesitant to provide funds given Hamas’s control of the Gaza Strip and the group’s commitment to eradicating the Jewish state. The Times of Israel reported that this latest conflict “was the third in less than six years” and quoted Mustafa as saying that Hamas’s control of Gaza has concerned donors weary of funding reconstruction in a region that had the potential to see future conflict:
“Some donors say why sponsor Israeli wars in Gaza every two years,” Mustafa said. “Some donor countries are concerned because of the atmosphere on the ground … because the reconstruction is not possible without enabling the (Palestinian) government to take the lead in all aspect of life in Gaza.”
Analysts and diplomats – including those from the US, Europe, and the Palestinian Authority – have long emphasized that Hamas must be disarmed to avoid what has been described as the “Hezbollah model,” a situation under which the PA would gain functional control over the Gaza Strip’s civil institutions while Hamas maintained actual control via superior arms.
The scenario, it is feared, would provide Hamas a relatively free hand to pursue attacks against Israel, which would in turn be called upon to eschew retaliation so as not to damage nominally PA infrastructure. Taking political control of the Gaza Strip while allowing Hamas to keep its arsenal would also put the PA in violation of blackletter treaties – most specifically Oslo II and the Wye Accords – that sharply limited the types of munitions permitted in the territory. Congressional funding to the PA is heavily conditioned on the body meeting its signed treaty obligations.
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