Word: arafats
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Yasser Arafat's security forces in the Gaza Strip, nearly all of them veterans of the battle against Israel, faced a new foe last week: the enemy within. They answered the challenge from Gaza's Islamic militants in precisely the same way that the Israeli occupiers had done -- bluntly, and with lethal force. By the time the bloody fraternal clashes had simmered down, 15 Palestinians were dead, another 200 were crowding the hospitals and hundreds more were behind bars...
...dread that worse was still to come, that the countdown for a cataclysmic collision among Palestinians had begun. "The signs are alarming," said Eyad Sarraj, a human- rights activist in Gaza. "We have all the ingredients for a civil war." Certainly the bloodshed marked a new low for Arafat's already troubled administration. Self-rule has brought the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip little but disappointment, and their frustration is increasingly aimed at Arafat. Having turned his guns on compatriots, the Palestinian leader now faces a huge new credibility problem with his people...
...potential for fratricide has always loomed in the background as the Palestine Liberation Organization sought to impose its authority, especially in the heavily fundamentalist Gaza Strip. Until recently, Arafat's self-rule administration had maintained a compact with the militant Muslim groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which adamantly oppose his peace accord with Israel and are trying to sabotage it with violence. The extremists focused their attacks on Israel and areas of the West Bank still under Israeli control. Arafat, for the most part, left them alone within his jurisdiction in the Gaza Strip and Jericho, despite Israeli pressure...
...hands-off policy has broken down. Earlier this month, Islamic Jihad for the first time publicly threatened to attack Arafat's security personnel. Then the group struck hard within the Strip itself, when a suicide bomber bicycled into an Israeli army position, killing three soldiers. At the same time, Islamic Jihad activists were holding a provocative rally in Gaza City, brandishing rifles and promising more mayhem. Palestinian Justice Minister Freih Abu Middain declared that the militants had "crossed the red line." The Palestinian Authority banned unlicensed demonstrations and rounded up some 200 Islamic Jihad members...
...least seven armed groups of the Fatah Hawks, allies of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, have formed in the Gaza Strip as strike forces against the Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants threatening to intensify attacks on Arafat's budding Palestinian government. Their threat comes in response to the shootingdeaths of 14 Islamic protestersby PLO police in Gaza City Friday. (Today, gunmen in a Gaza City orange grove shot and killed a Palestinian secret police captain, the first time an officer had been ambushed.)Arafat, in fact, interspersed dozens of masked Fatah Hawks at a rally of 10,000 supporters yesterday...