Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians marked the third anniversary of Yasser Arafat’s death in Gaza Monday with more inter-Palestinian bloodshed, underscoring a division that the late Arafat had relentlessly tried to avert since the 1993 interim peace accords with Israel and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in the Palestinian territories. Medical and Fatah sources said six people were killed by gunfire in the largest rally to be held in Gaza City since the Islamic Hamas movement ousted the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority from the Strip five months ago. Reports said another 100 people were injured when Hamas’ Interior Ministry’s Executive Force opened fire at whom it said were gunmen who fired at them first from atop buildings.

Arafat

Rival Hamas and nationalist Fatah exchanged the blame, each saying the other side was responsible for the bloodiest clashes to erupt between the two sides since weeks of intra-Palestinian bloodshed ended with a Hamas victory in the Gaza Strip in June. A spokesman from the Hamas Interior Ministry accused Fatah supporters at the rally of firing at its police force and said crowds hurled provocative insults at them. Eyewitnesses said crowds chanted “Shiite, Shiite,” accusing the Islamic movement of being a proxy for Iran. Hamas forces also arrested an unknown number of people while they were dispersing and they vowed to arrest those who they claim started to fire at their security personnel. But Fatah leaders denied it had any armed men among the demonstrators, saying all their elements had been stripped of their weapons by Hamas in June, insisting that Hamas is the only armed party in the Gaza Strip today. They accused its Islamist rivals of deliberately marring “the memory of Yasser Arafat and his legacy.” Independent Palestinian analysts say both sides are to blame for Monday’s bloody events, just as both are equally responsible for the deep rift that started with Hamas’ overwhelming election victory in January 2006 that took away dominance from a disgruntled Fatah movement weakened by Arafat’s death on November 11, 2004. “We often agreed with President Abu Ammar (Arafat) and we often disagreed with him,” Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum told Agence-France Presse on Sunday. “But in spite of this, we consider him a symbol of the Palestinian nation.” But analysts say Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood group founded during the first intifada in 1987 as an armed resistance organization, did not effectively value Arafat as a unifying leader and representative of the Palestinian people until his demise unleashed corrupt forces within Fatah, which eventually led to Fatah’s defeat to Hamas in the polls. Nevertheless, Hamas lost much of the endorsement it had received in the popular vote after its military campaign against Fatah authorities in Gaza left hundreds dead. The move split the authority into an Islamic Hamas administration in Gaza and an emergency government that President Mahmoud Abbas named under Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, with neither side recognizing the other. Palestinian analysts say Monday’s bloodshed is a crude reminder that the division between the two most powerful Palestinian movements is only becoming deeper by the day, making any attempt for national reconciliation a more difficult task. They say that the hundreds of thousands who gathered in Gaza Monday came to renounce the very division that has diverted national attention from the Israeli military campaigns in the Palestinian territories, resisting the Israeli occupation and turned Palestinian guns against each other. Hamas has repeatedly called for national reconciliation talks, but Abbas and his Fatah movement say they will not negotiate with the “outlawed coup d’etat-makers” until the Islamic organization apologizes for ousting the Palestinian Authority and returns to the status quo before June. Monday’s Gaza events and the casualty toll, however, are not expected to help Hamas’ credibility as it calls for national reconciliation, even if its claims that Fatah gunmen started the clashes prove to be true. If anything, the violence provided another opportunity for Fatah to lash out against Hamas, describing it as a dictatorship and not eligible for dialogue. Fatah official Azzam Ahmad said in a statement Monday there will be no dialogue with the “killers … no dialogue with those who don’t believe in dialogue but only understand the language of blood and murder.” AFP also quoted Mohammed Dahlan, a notorious Fatah leader in Gaza, as saying Monday’s events only showed the difference between a “national movement (Fatah) that wants to claim our rights from the Israelis and another (Hamas) that wants to spill blood and reject the other.” And Ahmad said, “I am convinced that the Palestinian people will purge them from their ranks and that the blood of today’s martyrs will be fuel for the resistance against them.” From Middle East Tmes