Dozens of masked Palestinian gunmen took over election offices in the Gaza Strip yesterday, exchanging fire with Palestinian police and demanding spaces on a list for Jan. 25 parliamentary elections.
The clashes came as the two main factions of the ruling Fatah Party -- the so-called "young" and "old" guards -- announced an end to an internal rift that threatened to bolster the electoral prospects of Hamas militants. Young guard members announced that Fatah will submit a single, unified list for the elections.
After intense negotiations, the two sides came together just two hours before an afternoon deadline yesterday for submitting the list.
"We affirm here that we are going to this election with one list. We are going to elections unified in Fatah to achieve a victory," said senior Palestinian official Mohammed Dahlan, a leader of the young guard.
In Gaza City yesterday, more than 60 gunmen stormed the main election office, exchanging fire with some 500 security forces who rushed to the scene, surrounding the building and setting up roadblocks. One policeman was wounded in the leg by gunfire and whisked away in an ambulance.
In Rafah, gunmen surrounded the election office, but Palestinian police prevented them from entering. In Khan Younis and Deir el-Balah, gunmen made it into the buildings.
All the standoffs ended within hours with the gunmen leaving the scene.
Such activity by gunmen has become increasingly common in the West Bank and Gaza in recent months, underscoring growing lawlessness in the Palestinian territories. Yesterday's violence highlighted the rising chaos within Fatah itself, adding the demands for participation of the Fatah-affiliated Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades to an already volatile mix of competing interests.
The Palestinian Interior Ministry condemned the mayhem, saying in a statement that attempts to take over election offices are "national crimes."
An Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades leader in Khan Younis, Abu Zakariya al Assouili, said his group tried to contact Abbas to push for greater participation in the party list but to no avail.
"We're objecting to a Palestinian election that does not represent a Palestinian vision," he said. "We want the base to dictate our fate, not America or Israel."
Dahlan said that yesterday's healing of the Fatah rift would augur well for stability in the Palestinian territories.
"Now Fatah is unified in one list and its Ministry of Interior has the responsibility of implementing law and stopping chaos," he said.
Fatah has been bitterly divided between party veterans and a young generation of activists -- led by jailed uprising leader Marwan Barghouti -- demanding a bigger role in party decision-making. Two weeks ago, the young guard broke off from the party to protest Fatah's slate of candidates and submitted its own list. Eager to bring the young guard back, Abbas agreed to redraw the party's list of candidates, giving top positions to younger activists.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS