Ceasefire in Gaza after inter- Palestinian violence escalates
By Andrea Doucet,WNS Israel Bureau Chief
GAZA CITY - Armed Palestinian groups including Hamas and Fatah agreed on a ceasefire to end spiralling unrest that claimed at least three lives, the head of a high-level committee that includes all the groups told AFP. Despite the accord, exchanges of late-night automatic gunfire continued in the Rimal area of Gaza City near Shifa hospital, an AFP journalist reported. "There is an agreement between all armed Palestinian groups for a ceasefire and to end the violence," Ibrahim Abu Najja said earlier after a day of unrest in Gaza in which at least three Palestinians were killed. The accord was confirmed by Hamas spokesman Ismail Radwan, who told AFP that the ceasefire pact stipulates that "armed men must stop circulating on the streets".
The news came after British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had spent the day in Iraq, arrived in Israel for talks aimed at breathing new life into the moribund Middle East peace process. Tit-for-tat violence between rival Palestinian factions gripped Gaza on Sunday, leaving a teenage student, a colonel in the security services and a member of the presidential guard dead, a day after president Mahmud Abbas' high-stakes call for early elections. Abbas' move set off fears that the bitter power struggle between Hamas - the Islamist movement that took power in March after a shock election win - and the president's own Fatah faction could ignite a civil war.
Explosions and automatic gunshots rocked central Gaza City for hours as Hamas and Fatah gunmen traded fire around the presidential compound. A 19-year-old woman was killed and six other people were wounded. In the evening, a Fatah spokesman said a colonel in the Palestinian national security service was kidnapped and killed by Hamas militants. Adnan Rhami, 40, was abducted with two bodyguards in the Jabaliya camp, after which the masked kidnappers shot him and dumped his body, said the spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity.
posted by wnsworld @ 4:17 PM
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