Olmert Backs Arms for PA Hamas-Fatah Militia Merger

by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu and Nissan Ratzlav-Katz, INN

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s agreement on Sunday to an American plan to provide weapons and training to expanded numbers of Fatah militia members in the Palestinian Authority (PA) comes at the same time the PA is uniting Hamas and Fatah militia forces.

[This blows the mind]

The United States will transfer weapons and funds for the Fatah forces, which will be trained by foreign Arabs and possibly Americans at American-built facilities.

Abbas offered in return a new scheme to put a halt to weapons smuggling and terror attacks that have plagued Israel despite the Gaza ceasefire that he and Prime Minister Olmert announced in late November. However, this time the two leaders agreed to allow the newly-armed Fatah gangs to patrol the smuggling route along the Egyptian border. Along this route, a huge arsenal of advanced weapons has been smuggled from Egypt to the same Fatah and Hamas terrorist groups under the noses of the Egyptian soldiers.

The American plan to arm the PA’s Fatah gangs is nicknamed the “Dayton Plan” after Washington’s security coordinator to the PA, Lieutenant-General Keith Dayton, who helped devise it. It includes further Israeli concessions such as increased Arab traffic through the Karni checkpoint, a central Gaza crossing into pre-1967 Israel. A new, modern facility will be built there at a cost of over $25 million. The Dayton Plan, if implemented in full, is expected to cost US taxpayers a total of about $59 million.

The PA cabinet has just approved a new security plan uniting terrorist militias, including Hamas and Fatah’s Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, both of whom have claimed to be behind continuing rocket and bombing attacks against Israel.

The new security plan is intended to end local clashes between rival terrorists and to coordinate all of the armed organizations. Frequent intelligence reports, including those heard at American Congressional hearings earlier this year, have revealed that a large number of Fatah militia men also are members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the hearings, which resulted in a scaled-down of the amount of aid to Fatah, that she could not guarantee the money would not reach “the wrong hands.”

Muhammad Abdel El, spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committee, told WorldNetDaily last week that Fatah’s attempts to discover terrorists from his group “have not even scratched the surface of our infiltration.”

The same news site has frequently quoted Abu Yousuf, a member of Abbas’s elite Force 17 security forces, that the funds and weapons provided by the Americans would be utilized to “hit the Zionists.”

Previous weapons shipped to the PA, from the time of former Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin in the mid 1990s up until Israeli-approved transfers last year, have been used against Israel in terrorist attacks. The IDF frequently arrests Fatah-aligned terrorists who have committed or are planning suicide and bombing attacks.

However, the chance of unifying the forces in Gaza is nil, according to Samaria-based Arab analyst Nicola Nasser. He recently wrote in the Yemen Observer and Mideast Online, “More than 50 unofficial armed groups, some mafias and well-armed clans, have stepped in and appear to be consolidating control over key neighborhoods in Gaza Strip.”

“No one knows who is the authority. The Gaza Strip is full of thugs and gangsters who are responsible for the ongoing anarchy. Soon the Gaza Strip may be declared a dangerous zone, which means that all international organizations would have to leave.”

Gaza strongman and senior Fatah leader Mohammed Dahlan has been appointed the PA National Security Advisor. He said earlier this month that “a curse” has hit Gaza and that “many young men prefer to work for clans and not the security forces.”

The most recent and perhaps most serious of lawlessness is the kidnapping and unconfirmed report of the murder of British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) reporter Alan Johnston.

“The Dogmush family, which is thought to have a militia of about 2,000 men, is suspected of abducting him,” Nasser wrote.

Arutz Sheva Hebrew journalist Haggai Hubberman noted that Prime Minister Olmert’s agreement to back the American arms and training is a precedent that violates Israel’s insistence to demand that the PA put a stop to its being armed by Arab nations…. What is most amazing is that the Prime Minister accepted PA declarations that their being armed will prevent the smuggling of weapons into Gaza…when they themselves have been involved in smuggling.