Egypt reined in Hamas, says Israel
• Palestinian organisation adamant border demonstrations will continue
Palestinian protests on the Gaza-Israel border have dropped off over the past two days, with Israel on Wednesday pointing to what it said were Egyptian efforts to restore calm after dozens of Palestinians were killed by Israeli gunfire.
Gaza’s dominant Islamist Hamas movement denied that it was under pressure from Egypt to scale back the six-week-old demonstrations and said they would continue, although fewer Palestinians were now gathering in protest tents.
Gaza medics said two Palestinians were shot dead during Tuesday’s demonstrations along the 51km border.
On Monday, 60 were killed on the day the US relocated its Israel embassy to Jerusalem.
Pushing back against foreign censure of its army’s actions, Israel has — with Washington’s backing — accused Hamas of using civilians as cover for attacks across the frontier fence and to distract from Gaza’s internal problems. Hamas denies this.
Angered by the US embassy move and the Gaza bloodshed, Turkey expelled Israel’s ambassador and consul in Istanbul. Israel responded to its envoy’s expulsion by expelling Turkey’s Jerusalem consul.
The Palestinian foreign ministry announced the recall for consultations of its envoys in Romania, Hungary, Austria and the Czech Republic, citing those EU members’ participation in an official Israeli reception on Sunday for a US delegation that inaugurated the American embassy in Jerusalem.
There has been little Israeli domestic dissent at the lethal tactics around Gaza, where in the past decade Israel has fought three wars against Hamas.
Dubbed the March of Return, the protests were launched on March 30 to demand Palestinian access to family lands or homes lost to Israel during its founding in a 1948 war.
Israel and Egypt, citing security concern, maintain a defacto blockade on Gaza that has reduced its economy to a state of collapse during more than a decade of Hamas rule and repeated wars with Israel.
Two million people live in the narrow strip, most stateless descendants of refugees who fled or were driven out of homes in Israel at the time of its founding. They suffer from what the World Bank says is one of the highest rates of unemployment and say the blockade makes rebuilding impossible.
Gaza analyst Akram Attallah, pointing to the smaller number of protesters since Monday’s deaths, said: “I can see there is a retreat because of the Israeli bloody response … but Friday will represent an indicator to where things are going.”
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh made a brief visit to Egypt on Sunday, which has sought to act as a broker between the Islamists and other Palestinian factions, as well as Israel.
Israeli Intelligence Minister Israel Katz said an Egyptian intelligence chief warned Haniyeh that Cairo “knows and has proof” that Hamas was funding the protests and sending people to the border fence to serve “as living ammunition, women and children instead of shells and rockets”.
The Egyptian official “made [it] unequivocally clear to him [Haniyeh] that if this continues, Israel will respond and take far harsher steps, and Egypt will stand by and will not help,” Katz told Israel Radio. “Haniyeh returned to Gaza, Hamas gave an order … and, miraculously, this spontaneous protest by a public that could not handle the situation any more dissipated.”
There was no immediate response from Egypt to Katz’s statements, which Hamas dismissed as false.
“There is no mediation. The marches will continue until our people achieve their goals,” Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said. At a media conference at a protest encampment on Wednesday, Palestinian factions, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, urged Palestinians to take part in mass rallies on Friday.
But the start of the holy month of Ramadan on Thursday, when Muslims abstain from eating and drinking during daylight hours, could limit the scale of the demonstrations.
In a statement issued at the media conference, the factions said the Ramadan fasting would be taken into account. The marches would continue in early June, they said.
Organisers say the Gaza protests are civilian actions, noting the absence of Israeli casualties, compared with 107 Palestinian dead and thousands wounded. Israel disputes this.
The army said 14 of those killed on Monday were shot while firing on Israeli troops or trying to blow up the fence.
Most countries are keeping their embassies in Tel Aviv, however, saying Jerusalem’s status should be decided in talks between Israel and Palestine, which want to have their own capital there.
Those talks have been stalled since 2014.
Israel regards all of Jerusalem, including the eastern sector captured in the 1967 Six-Day War, as its capital. Palestinians seek East Jerusalem as the capital of a state they want to establish in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.