Gaza moves ever closer to the world of Mad Max, as police react angrily to their own inability to enforce a Palestinian Authority attempt at militant arms control.
Two dozen policemen last night stormed the Palestinian parliament building, firing in the air to protest against their humiliation by Hamas militants following the worst clash between the factions in a decade.
This followed running gun battles on Sunday between police and Hamas gunmen in the Gaza Strip, raising fears of a civil war.
Three people were killed – including Shati refugee camp deputy police commander Ali Makawi – and more than 50 wounded as the Palestinian Authority attempted to enforce its authority by confiscating weapons from Hamas operatives in Gaza.
The clashes raged for about six hours and subsided only about midnight on Sunday local time, after Egyptian mediators stepped in. It was the fiercest internal fighting since 1996.
“Yesterday, we did not have enough bullets,” said one of the protesting policemen last night.
“We had nothing to protect ourselves. Give us at least bullets to protect people and to protect our stations. Our commander died in front of us and we were running out of bullets.”
The “you can have my AK-47 when you pry it from my cold, dead, Palestinian fingers” reaction by Hamas to the PA effort is, to say the least, unsurprising.
The clash was triggered when police stopped a car in Gaza City containing four armed Hamas operatives and demanded that they hand over their weapons.
One of the four was Mohammed Rantisi, the son of the former Hamas leader in Gaza, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, who was assassinated last year by Israel. He refused the demand and when he attempted to drive off the police fired at the car’s tyres.
Hamas operatives living in the area soon joined in the fight while members of the Fatah movement, headed by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, joined in on the side of the policemen. The fighting spread to other neighbourhoods and the Shati refugee camp, at the edge of Gaza City.
The clashes came amid the growing tension that followed the PA’s announcement four days earlier that it would no longer allow arms to be carried in the streets by militants. Hamas officials said they had no intention of abiding by that order.
Ah, the smell of Gaza sans Israeli settlers. It smells like … civil war.
A senior Hamas official in Damascus, Mohammed Nazel, accused the PA of trying to liquidate Hamas, which is challenging Fatah’s control of the PA by fielding candidates in the coming legislative elections.
“There is a faction of the Palestinian Authority trying to eradicate Hamas and it plans a widespread conflict in the West Bank,” Mr Nazel said. “The hands of this faction, which is backed by Washington and London, are stained with Palestinian blood, and Hamas will confront it, even at the price of civil war.”
The PA’s Interior Ministry issued a similarly militant announcement.
“Hamas bears full responsibility for this crude violation of the law and the games it is playing with Palestinian blood,” it said. “We are determined to enforce the law and no one is above it.”
For its part, Israel currently seems quite content to sit back and watch the developments, happy for the meantime to not be a target of Palestinian bloodthirst.