Word: gaza
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...Palestinians, the elation that accompanied Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip has been replaced by fear that a bloody struggle will erupt between Abbas' security services and the myriad armed groups proliferating in the Palestinian territories. Abbas has had limited success in persuading the Islamist group Hamas to halt rocket attacks against Israel. But his more troublesome quandary is how to deal with militia leaders like Abu Samhadana, who nominally belong to Abbas' Fatah party but operate outside anyone's control. U.S. officials estimate that there are 3,000 Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank who consider themselves...
...official Palestinian military fled. But the group ran its refugee camps, towns and villages as gangster fiefs. With the Israelis gone, locals say it has increasingly turned to racketeering and extortion. Despite Abbas' ban on the public display of weapons, members of the gang can still be seen on Gaza's streets, openly toting their M-16 and AK-47 assault rifles. And Abu Samhadana has become a strident critic of Abbas and his henchmen, whom he views as ineffectual. "The reason for the chaos is the weakness of the Palestinian Authority," he says. "It is weak because...
...within Fatah. Over the summer, branches of the Salah ed-Din Brigades also launched a series of kidnappings of foreign aid workers and journalists in what amounted to gangster-style extortion bids. Take the kidnapping of Muhammad Ouathi, a French-Algerian journalist. Members of the brigades swiped Ouathi in Gaza City on Aug. 14. Abu Samhadana stepped in to negotiate, persuading Palestinian officials to release, in return for the liberty of the journalist, 10 of his men held by the police for a raid on Gaza's central jail in January...
...Rafah is particularly desperate: it has a 66% unemployment rate, compared with 25% among Palestinians in general, and 81% of its residents live in poverty. Israel demolished thousands of homes near the border to prevent militants from digging tunnels beneath them that could be used to smuggle weapons into Gaza. The meager refugee-camp blocks facing the border are a bullet-pocked mess of twisted rebar and shattered concrete...
Ultimately, Abbas' prospects for controlling the gunmen may depend on the health of Gaza's economy. Abbas has announced a few new infrastructure projects since the Israeli pullout, but they won't provide nearly enough jobs for the 20,000 gunmen operating in the Gaza Strip, according to Palestinian security officials. Abbas already has a bloated public payroll that eats up 62% of his budget, and World Bank officials are leaning on him to fire some of his nearly 60,000 security officers, not hire more. If economic opportunities stay bleak, the gunmen may well push Gaza deeper into lawlessness...