Word: gaza
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...send his own army to do what Arafat has failed to do - stop terror attacks on Israelis. By Friday, the Israeli Defense Force had mounted some of its heaviest attacks yet on Palestinian Authority-controlled areas, sending in troops and tanks to conduct mass arrests and bombing Gaza with...
...Still, despite Sharon's dramatic tone and escalation of attacks on Palestinian Authority (PA) targets in the West Bank and Gaza, the portent of his latest message is not yet clear. Pronouncing Arafat "irrelevant" simply repeats, hyperbolically, what many close observers of Palestinian politics have warned of for months - that the aging leader's political authority has waned over the course of the current intifada to the point that he is no longer able to impose his will on the Palestinian street. Or, he is unable to find the political will to reassert his authority against the tide of Palestinian...
Indeed, the evidence suggests that Sharon’s visit was merely a pretext for an uprising that had been planned long in advance. Imad al-Faluji, the Palestinian Authority (PA) minister for communications, put it plainly during a speech in Gaza in December 2000 (reported by the Arabic-language newspaper Al-Ayyam): “The PA had begun to prepare for the outbreak of the current intifada since the return from the Camp David negotiations, by request of President Yasser Arafat…and not as a specific protest against Sharon’s visit...
...opposition to Oslo kept Hamas from challenging Arafat in the 1994 elections for the PA. It did, however, challenge and resoundingly defeat Fatah in many student council elections in the West Bank and Gaza. Still, there was always dialogue between the PA and Hamas, and periodic uneasy, silent agreements between them. In 1996, Hamas unleashed a wave of deadly bombings that killed 60 Israelis in eight days, prompting Arafat to clamp down heavily - some 1,000 Palestinians were arrested and the PA even ousted Hamas from some of its mosques. Later, the organizations appear to have negotiated a modus vivendi...
...Hamas emerged as a direct rival to the secular in PLO in the West Bank and Gaza in 1987. Whereas the Israeli military authorities had banned PLO organizations from operating openly there, it consciously allowed Hamas - whose activities did not at that time include armed actions - to flourish as an alternative to Arafat, who remained Israel's primary enemy at the time. But Hamas's active role in the first intifada led to Israel banning the organization in 1989 and imprisoning its founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin...