The intra-Palestinian political stalemate was damaging enough, but during the
summer of 2006, the situation worsened. On June 25, guerrillas from Hamas and
Islamic Jihad crossed into Israel and attacked an army installation. Two soldiers and
two guerrillas died in the ensuing firefight, but the guerrillas managed to capture an
Israeli soldier and take him into Gaza. After demanding the release of the soldier but
failing to secure it, the Israeli government unleashed a military assault on Gaza; troops
moved into several parts of the territory, and the air force destroyed key installations,
including a power plant that provided most of its electricity. Israel stopped short of
reoccupying all of Gaza, from which it had withdrawn ten months earlier, but the
assault wreaked even more havoc on a territory with an economy already in a nose-
dive (Israeli Disengagement, p. 313).
Violence among Palestinian factions, which had been an increasing problem for
several years, worsened and by mid-December 2006 threatened to erupt into a full-
scale civil war. This crisis began when gunmen shot and killed three children of a
Fatah security official in Gaza; three days later, Fatah gunmen attacked a convoy car-
rying Prime Minister Haniyeh, who was returning to Gaza from a trip during which
he had collected millions of dollars in cash from Arab governments. One of Haniyeh’s
bodyguards died in the attack, and the next day thousands of people turned out in
Gaza City for a demonstration that included threats against Fatah in general and Abbas
in particular.
On December 16, in this tense atmosphere, Abbas played his one trump card,
announcing that he planned to call early presidential and parliamentary elections for
- That threat led to a series of negotiations between Fatah and Hamas resulting
in the formation of a “national unity” government in mid-March 2007. Hamas’s
Haniyeh continued to head the government, which by agreement now included sev-
eral senior officials from Fatah and technocrats independent of both factions.
The Palestinians’ newfound harmony did not last long. By early June in Gaza,
armed supporters of Fatah and Hamas engaged each other in renewed violence.
Hamas—which by 2007 had a much broader base of support in Gaza than did Fatah—
prevailed in this battle, defeating Fatah security forces and taking outright control of
Gaza on June 13. Thousands of Fatah supporters fled into Egypt or Israel or went
into hiding. Abbas, based in the West Bank, responded by dissolving the Hamas-led
government and appointing a new government of Fatah members and technocrats
whose writ by this point extended only to the West Bank. Thus, in mid-2007, the
Palestinians had two competing centers of power: Hamas in Gaza and Fatah on the
West Bank. Israel and Western powers, notably the United States, moved quickly to
bolster Abbas and his Fatah faction with money and weapons in hopes that improv-
ing the quality of life for Palestinians on the West Bank might undermine the posi-
tion of Hamas in Gaza.
Following are two documents: the English-language text of a statement released by
the Palestinian Authority’s Palestine Information Center on March 20, 2006, out-
lining the main points of the new Hamas-led government’s agenda and the text of
a letter from Mahmoud Zahar, the foreign minister of the Palestinian Authority, to
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, dated April 4, 2006, and appeal-
ing for international support for the new Palestinian government.320 ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS