In a real shocker, AFP has just calmly stated that the situation in Gaza is a civil war. They bury it a few paragraphs into the story and simply state it as a matter of fact. After all the tapdancing around the issue, they finally come out and say it. And the war threatens to spread to the West Bank next. (As I understand it, that area has more Fatah loyalists than Hamas. So the payback may not be long in coming. Although it unlikely that Israel will allow the situation to get as bad as it is in Gaza.)
Diplomats said a top aide to Abbas told them some of the president's men ran for their lives, others ran out of bullets and that after five days of battle "Gaza is lost."
Abbas, who called the fighting "madness," and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas agreed in a telephone call on the need to staunch the bloodshed, according to officials on both sides.
But with the machineguns and mortars of civil war echoing in Gaza City after dark, hospital officials tallied another 33 deaths over the day, including a teenager at a peace rally and schoolboy shot leaving an exam. Two Palestinian U.N. refugee workers were killed too.
Most of the dead though were fighters.
Each side accused the other of more atrocities in vicious fighting that has killed 81 people since Saturday. With Fatah forces routed or surrounded in places, Palestinians' two small territories, Gaza and the West Bank, were ever more estranged.
In the relatively tranquil and more populous West Bank, Fatah militants threatened to attack Hamas figures and small groups wrecked fittings in Hamas-run public buildings.
Still no real denunciations of the atrocities by Western governments, however. Or I haven't found any, at any rate.
What an interesting civil war…in the final analysis they are fighting over the best way to exterminate the Joooosss.