Warring Palestinian factions agreed to a new ceasefire on Wednesday after 15 more Palestinians were killed in Gaza. Four days of fighting have renewed fears of a full-scale civil war in Gaza and left the fragile cabinet uniting President Mahmud Abbas’ Fatah party and the Hamas movement teetering just two months after it assumed office. Hamas ordered its fighters to halt their fire at 1700 GMT, while Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas ordered troops loyal to his Fatah movement to do the same immediately. This marks the fourth truce agreed upon by the rivals since fighting flared on Sunday. “Hamas has decided on a unilateral ceasefire to protect the blood of the Palestinians,” the chief of Hamas’s faction in parliament, Khalil al-Hayya told AFP. “Hamas is ready for dialogue to solve all problems.” In Ramallah, Abbas’s office said that, “the president has ordered all security services and their armed men to cease their fire immediately.”
Earlier, Israel bombed a Hamas training camp in Gaza, killing two people, after a barrage of militant rockets fired from the territory, medics and witnesses said.
As international calls for a halt to the violence mounted, Abbas and Hamas’ exiled political supremo Khaled Meshaal agreed to work to halt the bloodshed which is threatening to collapse the unity cabinet and peace efforts. Palestinian Information Minister Mustafa Barghuti said that Abbas and Meshaal agreed in a telephone call “on the necessity to put an end to the bloody events between Hamas and Fatah in Gaza”.
Abbas was due to travel to Gaza on Thursday and Deputy Prime Minister Azzam al-Ahmad warned that he could declare a state of emergency in the territory. “If the president’s efforts to end these events do not succeed, he will quickly turn to the Palestine Liberation Organisation to take a series of measures, including declaring a state of emergency,” Ahmad said after a meeting of the PLO executive committee in Ramallah.
Five Fatah men were killed on Wednesday in a brazen attack with grenades, anti-tank shells and mortar rounds by Hamas on the Gaza home of the pro-Fatah Palestinian security supremo, Rashid Abu Shbak, who escaped unscathed.
Later in the day, Hamas fighters fired anti-tank shells at the building containing the apartment of the head of the pro-Fatah preventative security force in Gaza City, without causing injuries. Another eight people, including one civilian, were killed when Hamas fighters fired anti-tank shells on a Fatah vehicle carrying detainees of the movement.