Three Hamas men were shot dead during the funeral of a member of the Islamist movement in a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon on Sunday, an official from the Palestinian Authority told AFP, blaming Fatah for the action.
Relations between Hamas and Fatah, the movement of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas based in the West Bank city of Ramallah, have been strained since 2007, when Islamists seized control of the Gaza Strip following bloody clashes.
“Fatah members fired on the funeral procession” of a Palestinian refugee killed in an explosion on Friday in the same refugee camp, Burj al-Semali, said Rafat al-Moura, a Hamas official, who also spoke of injuries.
Talal al-Abed Qasim, an officer with the Fatah security forces close to Fatah, said the man who opened fire “was not a member of the Fatah movement or the security forces,” and said he was willing to accept an “investigation.” “, According to the official Lebanese news agency, ANI.
The Lebanese army said last night that security forces in the Palestinian refugee camp of al-Bas had handed over the alleged perpetrator of the attack on Burj al-Semali and that an investigation had been launched, clarifying that the suspect was a Palestinian. The al-Bas and Burj al-Semali camps are both located in the Tire area.
Several deaths and injuries are reported during an armed clash at the funeral of Hamza Shaheen, the Hamas member killed in the explosion in Burj Shamali in Lebanon on Friday night. pic.twitter.com/ZMNpjZpGIW
– Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) December 12, 2021
For its part, Hamas issued a statement last night accusing it of “immediate responsibility” for the “murder” of its members in the Palestinian Authority security forces, calling on them, like Fatah, to take “full responsibility for this crime.”
Speaking to Beirut by telephone from Beirut, the Palestinian ambassador to Lebanon, Ashraf Dabour, denied the allegations. “This is an action that we condemn (…). “We have contacted Hamas leaders and demanded that they wait for the results of the investigation, which will be carried out by a ‘committee’ under formation,” he said.
Already before the shootings, armed elements of both Fatah and Hamas, the two largest Palestinian factions, had been deployed in the area where the funeral was to take place on Sunday, a resident of the camp said. Mourners chanted pro-Hamas slogans in the streets.
Another resident of Burj al-Semali said he had started “arguing with the arrival of the funeral procession at the camp cemetery, when suddenly someone opened fire in the direction of the crowd”.
“After that I do not know who was shooting who,” he added, referring to fire from all directions.
Old hatred
Another resident of the camp said that “when the fire started, the funeral procession left (…) and the people fled”. Since then the atmosphere is very tense and Fatah has put its forces on alert, he added.
On Friday night, a powerful explosion occurred in the camp with one dead.
Hamas said it was due to a “short circuit in a warehouse containing gas cylinders and oxygen cylinders intended for patients with the new coronavirus”, while a source close to the Lebanese army said that the explosion took place in a depot of weapons and ammunition. .
The bomber struck shortly after noon in front of a police recruiting center at Kisak, killing at least three people and wounding three others, Hamas Sahin was quoted as saying.
Lebanon is hosting at least 192,000 Palestinian refugees, most of them in 12 camps on its territory, according to official figures dating back to 2020.
They live in misery in the camps, where the infrastructure is dismantled.
Under an agreement reached many years ago, the Lebanese army does not enter these camps, where security is guaranteed by the Palestinian factions.
These factions carry weapons inside the camps, where attacks, killings and hostilities between rival organizations have been recorded in recent decades.
The presence of armed Palestinians in Lebanon has been ongoing since the 1970s, when rebels began conducting operations against Israel from the country, before the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975.
In 1982, after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, 11,000 Palestinian fighters fled the country.
Fatah and Hamas remain at bay after the Islamist movement won the last Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 and then ousted fighters from Mahmoud Abbas’s faction the following year.
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