By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 2, 2006; A14
JERUSALEM, Oct. 1 -- The Palestinian security service controlled by Hamas moved forcefully in the Gaza Strip on Sunday to disperse demonstrators loyal to the rival Fatah movement who were demanding months of back pay from a nearly bankrupt government.
At least six people were killed, including two teenage boys, and more than 100 were injured in day-long clashes that marked the most severe partisan violence between the two sides in months.
The fighting, which erupted in downtown Gaza City and later flared in the West Bank, came after Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas's effort to form a power-sharing cabinet with Hamas collapsed in recent days. The apparent failure has brought mutual recriminations between the two main Palestinian political movements at a time of stifling economic crisis in the territories stemming from international sanctions against the Hamas-controlled government.
Ghazi Hamad, an adviser to Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, called the violence "regrettable." He accused the demonstrators, many of them from the Fatah-dominated security forces, of attacking members of the 3,000-member security branch that reports directly to the Hamas-run Interior Ministry. Many of those who serve in that force also belong to Hamas's military wing.
"The protest today was beyond acceptable legal norms and turned truly into lawlessness," Hamad told reporters in Gaza.
Fatah leaders in Gaza called on Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, to launch a probe into the crackdown and take action against the Hamas government. One of those killed was a member of the Palestinian preventive security forces, a powerful branch whose ranks are filled with Fatah members.
Abbas has so far declined to exercise his authority to fire Haniyeh and dissolve the government. But pressure is building within his party for him to take bold steps to end the political crisis following his apparent failure to organize a so-called national unity government.
Abbas announced last month that his secular-nationalist Fatah party and Hamas, a radical Islamic movement, had agreed to a joint political program that would usher in a power-sharing government. Haniyeh endorsed the agreement, which his aides said would leave him in the position of prime minister. The new government would comprise members of the two major parties, smaller movements with seats in the parliament and technocrats without political affiliation.
The agreement also accepted the 2002 Arab peace initiative that calls for the recognition of the Jewish state once Israel leaves all territory it occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.
But the deal has unraveled in the past few days. Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders have said that Hamas as a movement would never recognize Israel's right to exist. Abbas has accused Hamas of reneging on the agreement, saying the talks to form a unity government are "back to square one."
The United States, the European Union and other international donors have demanded that Hamas renounce violence, recognize the Jewish state and accept signed agreements with Israel in return for a renewal of aid, which accounts for nearly half the authority's $2 billion annual budget.
Those sanctions remain in place, and Israel has also kept frozen the roughly $55 million in monthly tax revenue it collects on behalf of the Palestinian government, a sum equal to roughly half the authority's monthly payroll.
The 165,000 Palestinian government employees, nearly half of them in the security forces, have received only a small fraction of their salaries in the past seven months. A civil-service strike across Gaza and the West Bank has kept public schools shuttered, courts closed and the parliament out of action for nearly a month.
The clashes Sunday began outside the parliament building in Gaza, and gunfights quickly spread across much of the city's main commercial area. Witnesses said the Hamas security branch used grenades, antitank weapons and rifles to break up the protesters. There were also reports of violent demonstrations in the central Gaza city of Khan Younis. Later in the evening in Gaza, hand grenades were thrown at a group of Fatah demonstrators, killing one and injuring 30 0thers.
In response to the Hamas crackdown in Gaza, armed Fatah loyalists vandalized and partly burned the empty cabinet building in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Hours earlier, dozens of protesters there marched in the city streets, chanting "Hamas Out!"