And it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of terrorists.
GAZA (Reuters) – At least 10 Palestinians were killed on Tuesday — eight in one incident — in the deadliest fighting between Hamas and Fatah since the rivals formed a unity government to end bloodshed threatening to spill into civil war.
For many Palestinians, the violence was particularly disturbing, coming on the “Nakba,” an annual day of national reflection over shared suffering in the conflict with Israel.
In an attack near Karni Crossing, Gaza’s main commercial lifeline with Israel, Hamas gunmen killed eight members of Mahmoud Abbas’s Presidential Guard, a Fatah spokesman said.
But wait! Who does Reuters say killed the terrorists?
The Fatah-affiliated guardsmen were en route to help comrades under assault by Hamas at a training base near the crossing when Israeli forces across the frontier opened fire at them, the spokesman, Tawfiq Abu Khoussa, said.
There’s a different story from the AP:
Monday’s fighting erupted when Hamas gunmen approached a training base used by Fatah forces that guard the crossing, officials said. The base was set up in part by an American security team sent to train Palestinians on how to check cargo and baggage at crossings.
The Hamas force attacked the base with rockets, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars, said Ahmed al-Kaisi, spokesman for the pro-Fatah Presidential Guard, which guards the crossing under an agreement with Israel. “We consider this a serious provocation and a crime committed in cold blood,” al-Kaisi said.
When forces from another Fatah security unit raced to the scene to provide backup, they were ambushed by Hamas gunmen, witnesses said.
A jeep full of security men that came under fire veered off the road and crashed. Hamas forces then surrounded the vehicle and riddled it with gunfire, said one witness, who works in a nearby factory. “It was unbelievable. May God help us,” said the man, who gave only his first name, Jamil, out of fear for his safety.
As the fighting raged, Israeli troops opened fire at two gunmen who approached the border, the army said. Palestinian officials said one man was killed. He was identified as a member of the Presidential Guard, who apparently was trying to help his comrades against Hamas.
Either way, it’s one more dead terrorist. And the AP is using the active, “kills,” in the headline.
Hamas Kills 8 in Gaza Border Clash
It’s still just a “clash,” but apparently, the AP can use the word “kill” when it comes to Hamas and Fatah duking it out.
And once again, may they both lose.
Good luck to both sides in the fata-hamas civil war. I hope both sides enjoy enourmous success in killing their adversaries.
The world will indeed be a better place.
Faster, please!
chsw
I can’t help thinking of an article I recently read that recounted what a better place the Middle East would’ve been without the existence of Israel. If I remember correctly, the author was claiming that Palestine would’ve developed into a relatively prosperous “mercantile” nation.
It seems to me that Palestine is developing into a thugocracy. Maybe that’s because the so many years of war, occupation, and refugee status didn’t permit the development of functioning political institutions. But I don’t know if those institutions couldn’t have developed, anyway, under the aegis of Arab governments, the PLO, UNWRA, or the EU. And didn’t the Jews in Palestine develop institutions before statehood, a kind of proto-state referred to as the Yishuv?
What we’re seeing here is a government functioning on corruption and violence: like Sicily, but a Sicily with ideological pretensions.
I wonder if things in Palestine will ever get better. Many say that yesterday’s guerillas are tomorrow’s new Third World leaders. But many TW governments emerging after independence were themselves steeped in violence and corruption.
And I can think of two cases where liberation militias sunk into criminality. The Mafia in Sicily was originally known as the Black Hand. I understand that it started out as a guerilla force against the Spanish, who occupied Sicily for centuries. And I recently learned that the criminal “triads” of southern China had their beginnings in the 17th century, when they were loyalists to the Ming dynasty fighting against the establishment of the Qing dynasty.
I think that Palestine would have followed, and will follow, the path of a lot of Third World countries with no democratic traditions and weak civil societies: always hovering between dictatorship and civil war, with at best only a facade of democratic political institutions.
If Israel had never existed there would be no Palestine and certainly no Palestinians. The Arabs of Mandatory Palestine did not call themselves such. Before 1948 anybody who called himself a “Palestinian” was Jewish.
Except for the Balfour Declaaration the Levant as a whole would probably have ended up under French rule after WWI and then become part of “Greater Syria” which is what the Syrians have been angling for since WWII or even earlier. But they would hardly have been left in peace. Egypt has long had aspirations to control the Levant. These actually go back thousands of years, but in modern times Egypt invaded the Levant to conquer it from the Turks in 1831. The war lasted over ten years and virtually depopulated Palestine. The only reason the Egyptians lost was that the British stepped in to support the Turks.
So it’s likely that a Levant without a Jewish state would have seen a great intra-Arab war soon after WWII. Even in their war against Israel the Arab states were mostly interested in what land they could grab for themselves. Since most Arab wars are exercises in the competitive slaughter of civilians (see the Lebanese and Yemeni civil wars, among others) it’s probable that such a war would have depopulated, either from massacre of refugees, what the Arabs optimistically call Palestine today.