Abbas Accuses al Qaeda of Supporting Hamas

Forget the fact that Abbas didn't provide any actual evidence of such a claim. That didn't stop him from pulling out the west's bogeyman in an attempt to link them to Hamas. I guess it wasn't enough for the Bush administration to blame Iran. Now they've decided to try and up the ante, using Abbas as their spokespuppet, in an attempt to further demonize Hamas and to justify their interference in Palestinian politics.

In an interview on Monday with the RAI television network of Italy, Mr. Abbas said, “Thanks to the support of Hamas, Al Qaeda is entering Gaza.”
[...]
A Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Sami Abu Zuhri, said today that Hamas has “no links” to Al Qaeda and that Mr. Abbas “is trying to mislead international opinion to win support for his demand to deploy international forces in Gaza.”

Hamas has always tried to distance itself from Al Qaeda and that group’s agenda of global jihad, saying that Hamas’s own struggle is confined to the Israeli-Palestinian arena.

Because that's what it is confined to.

Meanwhile, the humanitarian disaster in Gaza keeps getting worse with the west and Israel funding Abbas in the West Bank while Gazans suffer. And on Monday, the UN suspended all of its construction projects in Gaza "citing a concrete shortage it said was caused by Israeli closures of a border crossing".

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) funds scores of building projects in the largely impoverished Gaza Strip. It buys its materials from Israeli housing companies and hires mostly Palestinian contractors.

"Some 93 million dollars worth of projects are on hold because cement and other building supplies have run out," said John Ging, UNRWA's director in Gaza, citing the crossing closure.

Christopher Gunness, an UNRWA spokesman, said some concrete was transferred from Israel to Gaza in recent weeks but it was not enough. The suspension of the projects would affect thousands of Palestinians, he and Ging said.

That can only further exasperate the situation. Gunness said there was "a risk of a public health disaster" if the facilities UNRWA had been funding were not maintained.

So, while Abbas is busy doing Bush's work - using the threat of al Qaeda to call for an international force in Gaza which Hamas would only view as being "hostile" - the crisis is at a standstill.

Next week, the Do-Nothing Imperialist Duo - Rice and Blair - are scheduled to make an appearance in the ME to...do nothing again. Meanwhile, Olmert cancelled a meeting he was due to have this week with two members of the Arab League citing scheduling conflicts (no doubt deciding to wait until the imperialists give him his marching orders first).

Just how long will this crisis go on while ordinary Palestinians continue to suffer as politicians refuse to budge and up the rhetoric in an attempt to escalate an already very fragile reality?