JERUSALEM – Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and top members of his Fatah party have been strongly lobbying Israel behind the scenes to continue the Jewish state’s military offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, WND has learned.
Informed diplomats in Jerusalem said Abbas and other top PA officials are concerned the Israel Defense Forces did not mount a strong enough campaign against their Hamas rivals, who in 2007 seized complete control of the Gaza Strip from Abbas’ U.S.-backed Fatah forces.
On Sunday, while Hamas signaled it was willing to enter a cease-fire with Israel, WND reported members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Fatah’s declared military wing, took responsibility for a barrage of five rockets and five mortars fired from the Gaza Strip that day. The attack lightly wounded two Israeli soldiers and one civilian. One of the rockets reportedly landed between two Jewish kindergartens.
Abbas complained the continuing rockets attacks from the Gaza Strip — which he publicly blamed on Hamas — only provided Israel with an excuse to attack the coastal territory, even while his own group boasted of responsibility for the attacks.
“Those people (Hamas leaders) gambled with the future of the people, they gambled with the blood of the people, the destiny of the people and the dream of the people,” Abbas said at a speech Sunday during a visit to an Egyptian hospital.
“Why? Because of agendas which are not Palestinian,” he added.
During Israel’s military operations against Hamas, Abbas repeatedly slammed the IDF, accusing the army of “massacring” civilians and carrying out “atrocities” in Gaza.
But the informed officials in Jerusalem speaking to WND said top PA leaders have been mounting a strong campaign with their Israeli counterparts calling on Israel to “finish” its job in Gaza and to “destroy” Hamas.
Following 22 days of confrontations, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last month declared a unilateral cease-fire with Hamas, although the IDF has been carrying out isolated strikes against small, mostly empty targets in Gaza the past three days in response to the continued Palestinian rocketing.
During Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, Israeli air strikes targeted both symbolic Hamas institutions, such as government buildings, and the group’s military infrastructure. The IDF struck rocket caches, police stations, explosives factories and some of the more than 1,300 smuggling tunnels between Gaza and neighboring Egypt.
But IDF sources confirmed Hamas’ estimated 6,000-man force trained in Hezbollah-like guerrilla tactics is still largely in place along with the majority of the group’s underground bunkers. In addition, about 60 percent of its rocket arsenal and most of its weapons caches are well-stored.
The IDF only launched two portions of a planned, three-stage assault on Gaza. The first stage was Israel’s continual aerial bombardment of Hamas targets, which the terror group admits dented its government infrastructure and which Israeli sources said resulted in some damage to the group’s military capabilities.
The second stage took effect about a week into the operation, with some ground troops entering Gaza, taking up peripheral positions in central and northern Gaza and mounting some small offensives within Gaza City and select northern Gaza camps.
But defense sources say to deal a decisive blow to Hamas, the IDF needed to embark on an extensive, large-scale ground operation that would have lasted several weeks and would have cleaned out central and northern Gaza of Hamas’ intact military wing.
The reports of Fatah petitioning Israel to fight Hamas comes as the two rivals continue to square off publicly. Yesterday WND reported Hamas is advocating the creation of a new umbrella body to represent all Palestinians and to compete with the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO, the group founded by Abbas’ predecessor, Yasser Arafat. The PLO is the foundation of Abbas’ legitimacy.
