Palestinian Leaders Targeted in Rising Violence

Things are beginning to really break down in Palestine as fighting grows towards a civil war.

JERUSALEM, June 12 — Gunmen of Hamas and Fatah, ignoring pleas from Egypt and from the Palestinian president, sharply escalated their fight for supremacy in Gaza today, with Hamas taking over much of the northern Gaza Strip.

Both sides accused the other of attempting a coup in what increasingly began to look like a civil war. Hamas demanded that security forces loyal to the rival Fatah movement abandon their positions in northern and central Gaza, while Fatah’s leaders met in the West Bank to decide whether to pull out of the national unity government and even the legislature in protest.

The unity government, negotiated in March under Saudi auspices, put Fatah ministers into a Hamas-led government in an effort to secure renewed international aid and recognition and to stop already serious fighting between the two factions.

But the new government has failed to achieve either goal, and it appeared to many in Gaza that the gunmen were not listening to their political leaders. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, is considered under increasing pressure to abandon the unity government he championed and once again try to order new elections, which Hamas has said it will oppose by any means.

“Tonight we may find ourselves at the beginning of a civil war,” said Talal Okal, a Gazan political scientist. “It’s not a civil war yet, but it is going in that direction. Maybe today or tomorrow. If Abbas decides to move his security forces onto the attack, and not to only defend, we’ll find ourselves in a much wider cycle.”