GAZA: Politically divided family urges leaders to reconcile

Two brothers, leaders in Fatah and Hamas urge political leaders meeting in Mecca to reach an agreement and form a national unity government in order to preserve Palestinian blood. At least 80 people were killed in battles between Fatah and Hamas gunmen since President Mahmoud Abbas announced elections in November. Palestinian brothers Ismail and Muaeen Mdaires have a special reason to hope that rival Fatah and Hamas leaders can reach a deal in Mecca to end Gaza's factional warfare. Ismail is an officer in Fatah's elite Force 17. Muaeen is a Hamas activist. Despite their political differences, both agree it would be a disaster if President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, meeting in Mecca on Tuesday (February 06), failed to put an end to battles which have killed at least 90 people in Gaza since December. "Today we have reached a stage in which we forgot who is our enemy, we forgot the martyrs and we forgot the incursions, we forgot the situation and the siege we suffer from. Our goal has become Fatah vs. Hamas, who is stronger, who is stronger on the ground," Ismail said. "We hope to God that the two sides find each other in Mecca the holy land an to agree, so we can end the disputes and disagreements between us," he told Reuters as he sat next to his lightly-bearded brother. They both sat inside Ismail's small but clean apartment, not far from a site of regular recent clashes, as their children played around them. Muaeen lives in another flat in the same building. The Mdaires split reflects political divisions across Palestinian society, including within many families. Their 65-year-old mother Suhaila said the brothers talk about their differences at home, but that it is forbidden that they exceed the point of talking. "I ask the big men meeting in Mecca to reconcile. I pray for them to reach an agreement," the mother of the two, Suhaila, told Reuters. Like many others in the Gaza Strip, the Mdaires family was displaced from Hebria, a nearby town just visible from Gaza, in the 1948 Israeli-Arab war. The brothers said they joined Hamas and Fatah to fight Israel, not themselves. "This is a black page in the history of the Palestinian people and maybe tomorrow our children will try and shred them from the history of Palestine, because it is embarrassing," Muaeen, Ismail's brother said. Ismail, 42, spent three years in an Israeli jail between 1988 and 1992. Muaeen, 38, was jailed for two years, some of them in the same prison as his brother. In the past, the two men have used their divided loyalties to help resolve local differences between Palestinian factions. "Today we put the son of Fatah and the son of Hamas in one morgue and they are cleaned in one area and get buried in one grave and the same people who march in his funeral march in the second funeral and this shows that there is still a social and family fabric maybe if the situation remains like this the fabric of the Palestinian society might not hold," Muaeen told Reuters. Their family bonds were tested when a nephew was abducted by a Fatah group who suspected he was from Hamas. They agreed eventually to seize a member of a Fatah family, saying they were forced to do after peaceful means failed to free him. The brothers said they hoped that even if Abbas and Meshaal failed to agree on a unity government which could end a crippling Western embargo, they could at least end the fighting. But Ismail said the outlook was not promising, blaming a hidden hand for the ongoing sparks of violence between the two. His brother said failure at the talks in Saudi Arabia, which many Palestinians view as a last chance to avoid civil war, would be catastrophic. "Today or tomorrow if they agree, our brothers in Mecca, it will be apparent in the Palestinian street and quickly so. We get affected by the political process, by statements, by the media we are suppose to be on a high level of knowledge and not to be so easily affected and get in fights over political stances," Muaeen said. His brother said he hoped in the end that Palestinians would overcome their differences.

ITN Source | February 7, 2007

Tags:. .funeral. .eventually. .failure. .elite. .disputes