Word: gaza
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...last week. Among them were several hundred Fatah Hawks, a military branch of Arafat's Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Hawks, who had been ignored of late by Arafat, swore, in chanted slogans, to defend him and the Authority. The militiamen then drove around the Gaza Strip, brandishing their guns and shouting slogans such as, "We shall shave the beards ((of the Islamists)) with our shoes...
...Hawks' demonstration inflamed Arafat's opponents in Gaza. "This show of muscle was a big mistake," said Mansour Shawa, president of the charitable Benevolent Society for the Gaza Strip. "It just provoked a lot of people." By aligning himself with a factional militia, critics said, the chairman had undercut his claim to be a national leader. "He is going back to acting like the head of a gang," said Ghazi Abu Jayyab, an activist in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Bloody Friday also tainted the image of the Authority's 9,000-member Gaza Strip security force...
...Israeli targets. During noon prayers at the Palestine Mosque last Friday, Sheik Said Siam vowed, "Our weapons will not accept any address except the chests of the Zionist enemy." Since Bloody Friday, there have been seven attacks or attempted attacks on Israeli soldiers and settlers in the Gaza Strip...
Cooler heads in Hamas' ranks have begun to talk about disavowing internecine violence in the Gaza Strip in return for being allowed a role in the Authority. Would Arafat go along? Before Bloody Friday, the chairman had appointed a Hamas member to serve on the Muslim religious courts in the West Bank, but in the wake of the fracas, he may no longer be interested in sharing power at any level...
...improvement in the sad economic shape of the Gaza Strip would help limit the appeal of Hamas -- which is why Palestinian officials, backed by the U.S. and Israel, will lobby international donors this week in Brussels to give the Palestinian Authority significant funding. Foreign aid is especially important now, since, as Khaled Abdul-Shafi, a Gaza economist, notes, "what happened last Friday reduces the chances of private investment to zero...