No Money For Payroll, Food, Education; But Plenty For Guns

[Annie]

See, it's in the newspaper, things are getting desperate, even for water!

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.as...01_NOOTR_RTRJONC_0_-251038-1&sec=worldupdates

May 25, 2006

Donors agree to move ahead on Palestinian plan
By David Brunnstrom

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Donor nations agreed on Wednesday to move ahead with an aid mechanism to prevent the collapse of essential services to Palestinians, but still differ its scope, making a June start date uncertain, diplomats said.

Major Western donors, led by the United States, froze direct aid to the Palestinian government after Hamas Islamists won January elections and refused to recognise Israel, renounce violence or embrace interim Israeli-Palestinian peace deals.

However, deteriorating conditions in the Palestinian territories and worries about unrest prompted the Quartet of Mid-East peace brokers to agree to set up a temporary mechanism to channel aid while bypassing Hamas, which Washington and Brussels list as a terrorist organisation.

The EU's executive Commission, charged with putting together the mechanism, put forward proposals this week that included providing tens of millions of dollars monthly to maintain public services like health and education, as well as welfare payments to doctors, nurses and teachers.

EU states discussed the proposals on Tuesday and while they failed to narrow differences on the scope of the mechanism, gave the Commission a mandate to come up with detailed plan in the next two weeks, a diplomat from an EU member state said.

The discussion broadened on Wednesday to encompass the Quartet -- the United States, Russia, the EU and the United Nations -- other donor states including Japan, as well as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

"There was a concurrence on the fact something needs to be done; that this is a commitment by the Quartet that extends to other donors who have agreed they are interested to participate," EU Quartet representative Marc Otte told Reuters...

But while they are carrying money by the suitcases through Egypt, looks where they are spending it:

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/13386990/site/newsweek/

The Gangs of Gaza
Killers are on the loose in the Palestinian territories—and they're not just targeting Israeli enemies. Fears of 'all-out chaos' are growing.
By Kevin Peraino
Newsweek

June 26, 2006 issue - At first, the threats trickling in to the Palestinian intelligence headquarters in Gaza seemed like childish pranks. Operatives chuckled about a Hamas-run Web site featuring a caricature of their boss, intel chief Tareq Abu Rajab: the Islamists had digitally grafted an image of a dog's head onto the Fatah loyalist's body. But then intelligence agents eavesdropping on a Hamas radio frequency intercepted a transmission that seemed deadly serious. "On Friday," a voice crackled in Arabic, "the dog will die."

Abu Rajab's security detail kept the boss away from the office that Friday. But the next morning, May 20, the intel chief stepped into his private elevator and punched the button for the fourth floor. A moment after the doors clamped shut, at 10:10 a.m., a bomb blast ripped a hole in the elevator's steel doors, spewing fire and a dense cloud of ash into the hallway. Choking on the stench of burning hair, Haitham Hamid, one of Abu Rajab's bodyguards, crawled toward the elevator. He discovered the corpse of another bodyguard dangling from his ankles in the shaft. Abu Rajab himself had survived the explosion, tumbling down the well to the ground floor, where he was injured but somehow still alive. As a convoy later rushed Abu Rajab to the hospital, Hamid glimpsed a blur of bearded militants spraying the cars with gunfire. "I knew immediately," Hamid later recalled to NEWSWEEK, "this could only be Hamas."

Abu Rajab is still recovering in a Cairo hospital. But in the month since the bombing, the conflict between Fatah security officials like Abu Rajab and their Islamist antagonists in Hamas has grown increasingly bloody. More than two dozen security personnel have been killed in civil violence over the past month, and last week the International Crisis Group issued a dire report predicting that Gaza is one step from "all-out chaos." If assassins succeed in killing even one high-ranking political figure, then "you'll be able to hear the bullets in the States," says a senior Palestinian intelligence official, who requested anonymity in order to avoid becoming a target himself.

Israeli officials have left little doubt about which side they back. Israel's goal is "to topple [Hamas], to bring about regime change," according to a senior Israeli security source, who requested anonymity in order to keep his job. Last week Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced that he had approved the shipment of small arms—reportedly hundreds of American-made M-16 rifles—from Jordan to President Mahmoud Abbas's Force 17 guards. Reuters reported that Abbas's guards had also received four new armored vehicles, worth roughly $100,000 each. (Abbas aides deny receiving any weapons or vehicles.) "We want to strengthen Abu Mazen so that he will be able to cope with Hamas," Olmert told reporters in London. "We are running out of time."

Yet at least some Israeli officials worry that war preparations sometimes develop a ruthless logic of their own. Once unleashed, chaos is hard to rein in. "If Hamas falls, who exactly is going to take over?" asks the Israeli security official. Publicly endorsing arms shipments to Abbas only reinforces the view that Fatah politicians are corrupt tools of Israeli masters—one of the issues that brought Hamas to power in the first place. "We have to be very careful ... not to present [Abbas] as an Israeli collaborator," says Ami Ayalon, a former director of Israel's Shin Bet intelligence agency. Talking openly about arms shipments is a "huge mistake," he says. "I do not understand this logic."

Fatah and Hamas are still engaged in talks to avert a civil war and reach an agreement on how to deal with Israel on terms that will satisfy the international community. Popular sentiment is behind that process, and many in Gaza believe that tribal and family ties will help prevent a full-blown conflagration. Khaled Abu Hilal, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, insists that "every family has members of both Fatah and Hamas." Yet Abu Hilal also keeps a 9mm Smith & Wesson in his desk drawer—just in case. And a Palestinian arms dealer in Ramallah, who wished to remain anonymous as he offered to sell NEWSWEEK an unsolicited MP5 submachine gun, says that the price of a U.S.-made M-16 on the black market has doubled, from $5,000 to $10,000, since Hamas took power. "Hamas is buying like crazy," the dealer says...