Hamas-Fatah deal brings few benefits
Though touted as a major breakthrough, and well-timed for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Friday speech at the United Nations General Assembly, the recent agreement between Hamas and Fatah to transfer control of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority offers little cause for celebration primarily because there is nothing to suggest that it will hold in the long term. The agreement comes in response to the Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire deal signed last month that called for the PA to take charge and pave the way for the re-construction of Gaza. In other words, billions of dollars in aid will soon be poured into the Mediterranean enclave that was flattened during the recent 51-day war with Israel, and both the Palestinian parties want to be the middlemen controlling the flow. The two parties have had an acrimonious relationship ever since Hamas forcibly took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 and removed Fatah workers from there (in some instances, by throwing them off the rooftops of high-rise buildings). In the eight years since then, the two have occasionally sought to come together but have failed each time. They tried again, most recently, this April when they joined hands to form a similar unity Government. Then, as is the case now, the deal was heralded as a path-breaking development. But new regime never really took shape as Fatah refused to pay the salaries of Gazan Government employees (who haven't received a pay cheque in several months) arguing that they worked for an illegitimate regime. This time around, Fatah has agreed to partially pay off the salaries, and has also come to an understanding with Hamas on border management, another contentious issue. However, their deal is silent on key issues such as who will control Gaza’s security forces and what will happen to Hamas’s military wing. Also, as the continued fighting between the two groups over the disbursement of the initial batches of post-war aid shows, it's going to be rough ride ahead.
Still, even if Hamas and Fatah stay together, hopes for the reconstruction of Gaza are bleak. A huge donor conference scheduled for October 12 in Cairo is expected to raise billions of dollars (as it did in Sharm el-Sheikh in 2009 after the bloody Operation Cast lead) but the mechanism to deliver that money remains fuzzy and fragile. The biggest obstacle, however, remains Hamas’s stranglehold over Gaza. There is nothing to suggest that the group is willing to cede control on the ground, or that the international community has a foolproof plan to prevent the misuse of aid money — in the past, money sanctioned for the building of schools and houses in Gaza had been siphoned off to build terror tunnels and buy Qassam missiles. In effect then, all that the Hamas-Fatah unity deal has done is it relieves the militant group of its governing duties, so that it is free to do what it does best — street-level fighting.