[IsraelTimes] Ramalla government demands release of hundreds of Fatah members it says were placed in durance vileYou have the right to remain silent...
by terror group in coastal enclave.
The Paleostinian Authority announced Sunday that it will its stop operations at the only border crossing between the Gazoo Strip and Egypt, in protest of Hamas, the braying voice of Islamic Resistance®,’s arrest of what it says are hundreds of members of the PA-affiliated Fatah party.
The PA said that, until further notification, it will withdraw its staff from the Rafah border terminal, which is used by travelers moving to and from Egypt, raising the possibility that the crossing will shut.
Under the terms of a November agreement, the Hamas terror group handed over control of the border crossing to the PA.
As a result of the PA announcement, Egypt is expected to close its side of the crossing, effectively shutting off traffic.
Hamas condemned the decision.
It was the latest development in the rapidly deteriorating ties between the two main Paleostinian groups, which have been at loggerheads since 2007, when Hamas ousted the PA from Gazoo.
Last Monday, Fatah said Hamas had rounded up 500 party activists to prevent them from organizing events to mark the 54th anniversary of their party’s founding, scheduled for the following day.
The Hamas-run interior ministry in Gazoo denied the accusations, saying it had only summoned 38 local Fatah leaders "to maintain order."
Paleostinian Authority President the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas
... a graduate of the prestigious unaccredited Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow with a doctorate in Holocaust Denial...appeared to call Hamas authorities "spies" over the incident.
"Shame on those who prevented the torch from being lit today in Gazoo," he said in a speech at the PA presidential headquarters in Ramallah. "Unfortunately, whoever does that is a spy."
On Thursday, Nabil Shaath, Abbas’s adviser for foreign affairs, told The Times of Israel that Abbas will meet Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi in Egypt to discuss reconciliation efforts between Hamas and Fatah.
The last publicly known time Abbas and Sissi met was November 3, in Sharm al-Sheikh, an Egyptian resort city.
In another incident, gunnies trashed the headquarters of the Paleostinian Authority’s television station in Gazoo on Friday. Fatah blamed Hamas for the incident, but Hamas later arrested five men it said were former PA employees whose salaries were recently suspended.
While the rival parties have signed a number of agreements to advance reconciliation, they have failed to implement them.
Most recently, Fatah and Hamas signed an Egyptian-sponsored reconciliation agreement in October 2017, but did not succeed in executing it on the ground.
Since a bomb went
kaboom!adjacent to PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah’s motorcade in March 2018, in Gazoo, Ramallah-based ministers have not visited the coastal enclave.
Abbas has accused Hamas of carrying out the bombing; the terror group has vehemently denied the charge.
In the recent past, Egypt has been the primary mediator between Hamas and Fatah.