A classified cable released by WikiLeaks originating from the US embassy in Tel Aviv has revealed how members of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party asked Israel to attack its rival Hamas, which had won elections in January 2006.
According to the dispatch, dated June 13, 2007, Yuval Diskin, the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s security agency, told the US ambassador to Israel at a meeting two days earlier that “demoralised” Fatah officials in Gaza had asked for help against Hamas. Diskin said, “They are approaching a zero-sum situation, and yet they ask us to attack Hamas. They are desperate. This is a new development. We have never seen this before”.
He was also quoted as saying, “Fatah is in a very bad shape in Gaza. We have received requests to train their forces in Egypt and Yemen. We would like to get them to get the training they need, and to be more powerful, but they do not have anyone to lead them”...
In other words, Abbas explicitly signed on to a State Department coup against a government in which his own party had been participating, an all-out civil war against Hamas and the suppression of all Palestinian opposition to Israel. In return, he was given a vague promise of support for a non-contiguous Palestinian mini-state.
The plan backfired. Instead of removing Hamas, its effect was to provoke a tragic and ongoing factional struggle between Fatah and Hamas. The conflict brought Palestine to the point of civil war and produced a pre-emptive action in Gaza by Hamas to forestall the coup planned by Fatah in May-June 2007.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/dec2010/gaza-d29.shtml
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