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RAMALLAH: Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas won the lifting of a
crippling Western aid freeze amid efforts to isolate Hamas in its
Gaza enclave, where fears are mounting of a humanitarian crisis.
The United States and Europe restored direct aid
to the Palestinians on Monday in a show of support for Abbas, who
set up an emergency government when his Islamist rivals seized power
in Gaza after days of brutal bloodletting.
“We will not leave 1.5 million Palestinians at
the hands of terrorist organizations,” US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice said of the impoverished Gaza Strip.
Rice said the United States was lifting its
15-month embargo on direct aid, as the European Union—the biggest
donor to the Palestinians—normalized ties with the new government
and resumed its own aid flows.
The moves came a day after Abbas swore in a new
12-member cabinet excluding the Islamists after sacking the
three-month-old unity government headed by Hamas Prime Minister
Ismail Haniya.
Hamas’s seizure of Gaza after vicious street
battles with loyalists of Abbas’s secular Fatah that left more
than 110 people dead in barely a week has driven a deep wedge in
Palestinian society.
Abbas’s government is based in his West Bank
stronghold while Hamas is in control of Gaza, a tiny strip of land
whose impoverished people rely on goods from outside but are now
sealed off from the rest of the world by Israel.
The Palestinian Authority insisted it remains in
full control, “administratively and morally,” of both the Gaza
Strip and the West Bank, but the divide has dimmed hopes of the
creation of a future independent state.
The EU partially froze ties and suspended direct
aid when Hamas swept to power last year after a shock win over Fatah
in January 2006 elections. The United States also cut off all aid
funneled directly to the Palestinian government in a bid to prevent
Western money ending up in Hamas coffers.
But the boycott deepened the desperate economic
plight of Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, one of the most
densely populated areas on the planet where 80 percent of the
population relies on aid.
Several hundred Palestinians are camping out in
miserable conditions at the Erez border crossing with Israel,
desperate to flee feared retribution after the deadly showdown and
threatened shortages of basic supplies.
“If we can’t get to the West Bank, give us
political asylum in an Arab country, in Europe, in the United
States. Anywhere,” shouted a desperate civil servant Amr, the
gates leading to Israel firmly shut.
In Luxembourg, EU foreign ministers urged Israel
to support the fragile government set up in defiance of Hamas which
is on a Western blacklist of outlawed “terrorist” groups.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is due
to meet US President George W. Bush on Tuesday, said the appointment
of Fayyad’s government could pave the way for revived peace talks
after seven years of stalemate.
The 27-member EU provided about 500 million
euros ($670 million) in direct aid a year until Hamas took power,
while Washington suspended or canceled $246 million in assistance in
April 2006.
The EU, however, continued to send aid to needy
Palestinians last year through a financing mechanism bypassing the
Hamas-led government.
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said her
country would pay hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes and
customs revenue to the new Palestinian government soon.
“We believe that time is of the essence,”
she told reporters in Luxembourg.
Israel froze the payments following Hamas’s
election victory and while it released some money early this year,
around $600 million is still owing.
“The money should not go to terrorists . . .
the Israeli assumption is to work with Palestinian moderates,” an
Israeli official said.
Rice said the US government would unblock $86
million in aid originally intended to build up Abbas’s security
forces and $40 million to the UN Relief and Works Agency for the
Palestinians.
US and EU officials were vocal in support of
Fayyad, a US-educated economist and former finance minister whom
Rice said had a “reputation for integrity.”
“We’re at a critical juncture for the
Israeli and Palestinian peoples, one at which the choices are ever
more clear,” Rice said.
“We must take hold of this moment to make new
progress toward the vision that President Bush laid out five years
ago this week: two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side
in peace and security.”
Fayyad on Monday chaired the first meeting of
his cabinet, with pledges to work to heal the deep Palestinian rift.
--AFP
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