Harvey Morris-29/05/2007

Harvey Morris, (Financial Times)

"Ismail Haniya, the Palestinian Authority's Hamas prime minister, went into voluntary seclusion in Gaza last week, heeding an Israeli hint that he was on a death list after his movement's militants resumed a rocket war on southern Israel.

Ehud Olmert, Israeli prime minister, must wish he could have done the same. On his outing to the rocket-blasted border town of Sderot last Monday, a booing crowd demanding his resignation and gave him the roughest reception of his troubled year-old tenure.

The people of Gaza, just across the border, were equally angry. Having spent almost a week sheltering indoors from a Hamas-Fatah war on the streets outside, they now faced the additional trauma of daily Israeli air strikes against the rocket squads.

The outbreak of violence on two fronts eclipsed tentative peace efforts by Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, who had been due in the region, and by Arab countries that are pushing their own Saudi-drafted peace plan.

Less than two years after Israel's unilateral evacuation of its civilian settlements from the Gaza Strip, a move the international community supported as a step towards promoting stability and prosperity for its Palestinian inhabitants, the territory has descended to new depths of lawlessness and economic misery. The choice of voters to elect Hamas, and the subsequent boycott by western states that regarded it as a terrorist organisation, were among the factors that contributed to the decline. But so, too, as organisations such as the World Bank and United Nations repeatedly warned, did Israel's stranglehold on Gaza's borders, which has throttled the economy and increased Gaza's isolation.

Now, fighting between rival factions threatens a collapse of central authority. This failure of the Mecca accord signed by Hamas and Fatah in February suggests that the lifespan of the power-sharing government they agreed to form is running out.

In the absence of any positive developments, there are worrying signs in Gaza that the chronic lawlessness is fostering the growth of new jihadist groups that the international community would find even less palatable than it does Hamas."

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