Palestinian human rights groups are blasting Hamas for banning several members of the rival Palestinian Fatah faction from traveling outside the Gaza Strip. The Iran-backed terror group has controlled the territory since it expelled most Fatah officials from it in a bloody 2007 battle. The Fatah officials who stayed inside the territory are now not being allowed to leave:
The Hamas authorities in Gaza banned on Saturday three members of Fatah international relations department from travel across Rafah crossing with Egypt on their way to Belgium to attend meetings with European officials. The three members, two men and one woman, were interrogated at the crossing about the reasons for their travel before they were told they cannot leave the Gaza Strip.
The Hamas authorities had also banned the day before Fatah Central Committee member Amal Hamad from leaving the Gaza Strip through Beit Hanoun (Erez) crossing with Israel on her way to Ramallah to attend a meeting for the Central Committee. Hamad arrived at the crossing with three other Fatah officials, who were allowed to cross without her after she was told that she was banned from travel.
The travel ban underscores ongoing hostility between the two Palestinian factions. Fatah controls the West Bank, and there has been a series of reconciliation talks aimed at overcoming the differences between it and Hamas. All have ended far short of success. Analysts have noted that both sides face structural disincentives to reconciling, which would establish a framework for uniting the two territories under a single Palestinian government; neither side wants to give up its territory to the other.
There is also genuine animosity between members of the two factions. Hamas committed multiple atrocities during the 2007 conflict, including shooting out the kneecaps of Fatah officers and throwing them off rooftops. There is lingering bitterness over those tactics.
Ongoing tensions and formal disunity, however, deeply complicate Palestinian pretensions toward statehood. The Palestinians sought and secured last year a United Nations declaration of non-member statehood. The move – though legally largely symbolic, and diplomatically costly – was used by the Palestinian Authority as a pretext for rebranding territories under Palestinian control as the “State of Palestine.” The ongoing split in governance between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, however, would render that state almost by definition a failed state.
[Photo: Al Jazeera English / Wiki Commons]
