TOPSHOT - Palestinian children look through a hole in a sheet metal fence outside their home in a poor neighbourhood inGaza City on August 8, 2017. (AFP photo)
GAZA, Aug. 16 (Xinhua) -- The endless feuds between Islamic Hamas movement, which rules the Gaza Strip, and 82-year-old Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who rules parts of the West Bank, may end up with a complete geographical and political isolation of the coastal enclave, analysts say.
These feuds, which started long before Hamas' violent control of Gaza in the summer of 2007, have created a deep political division between the two rivals, despite a series of reconciliation agreements and understandings reached over the past decade in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt.
Abbas started his unprecedented harsh measures with cutting 30 percent of 70,000 employees. He then sent thousands of employees working for more than 15 years to an early retirement. He also refused to pay for fuels to generate electricity and for medical and educational services in Gaza.
Last week, Hamas presented an initiative to end the internal split between Gaza and the West Bank. Meanwhile, Abbas accepted a similar initiative presented by 200 Palestinian figures. However, nothing substantive has been implemented yet.
"Over the past ten years of division, the arguments between the two rivals have looked like who comes first the egg or the chicken," Talal Oukal, a political analyst in Gaza, told Xinhua.
"As long as both don't change their attitudes and political agendas, the internal split will last forever," he noted.
According to Oukal, such division would ultimately lead to "a complete political and geographical isolation of the Gaza Strip."
In order to end Abbas' policy of punishing Gaza and Hamas, a top Hamas delegation visited Cairo in June to hold talks with Egyptian security intelligence and Mohammed Dahlan, a dismissed Fatah leader who has close ties to Egypt.
The talks lasted nine days and ended up with a series of understandings aimed at easing the pressure imposed by Abbas on Hamas and Gaza, including helping patients to get medicine and medical treatment, buying fuel to generate more electricity to end the severe power shortage in Gaza, and opening Rafah crossing with Egypt to allow the Gazans freer movement.
Analysts, however, fear that the Egyptian-sponsored understandings reached between Dahlan and Hamas may cause Israel and the U.S. to further obstruct the Palestinian cause of establishing an independent state.
"If Abbas insists on his policy of increasing pressure on Hamas, the suffering of the Gaza population increases and the understandings reached between Dahlan and Hamas are implemented, I think it will cause a disaster to the Palestinian cause," said Mustafa Ibrahim, a political analyst from Gaza.
