Palestine: Hamas says ready to hand Gaza to a Palestinian unity government - by Mohamed el Sherif, Ali Sawafta

Hamas has agreed to dissolve the administration that runs Gaza, it said on Sunday, a major step towards handing control of the enclave to a Palestinian unity government after a decade of bitter rivalry with President Mahmoud Abbas.

The Islamist group, which has ruled Gaza since a brief Palestinian civil war in 2007, said it had taken “a courageous, serious and patriotic decision to dissolve the administrative committee” that runs the territory of 2 million people, and hand power to some form of unity government.

Reunification a decade after Hamas and Abbas’s secular Fatah movement battled for control of Gaza may hinge on whether complex issues related to power-sharing - which stymied reconciliation bids in the past - can be resolved.

Abbas welcomed Hamas’ move - a result of talks mediated by Egypt - and said he would convene the Palestinian leadership for discussions upon his return from New York where he was attending the U.N. General Assembly.

The development would “enable the formation of a national reconciliation government to work in the Gaza Strip and hold ... elections,” he said in a statement on official news agency WAFA. 

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Arab Monitor - Celebrating the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Palestinians tear down a section of the Separation Wall

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While in the German capital pompous celebrations marking the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany were in full sway, on the outskirts of the West Bank city of Ramallah Palestinian demonstrators, aided by their Israeli friends, contributed in their way to the Berlin festivities by breaching Israel's concrete Separation Wall. According to Bethlehem-based news agency Maan, some one hundred demonstrators, wearing fluorescent jackets reading “We are going to Jerusalem”, broke through the Qalandiya checkpoint that normally separates Palestinians from Palestinians and prevents them from freely moving in their homeland. With the help of ropes and a truck the demonstrators managed to pull down some of the concrete slabs making up the Separation Wall in that location.

The Separation Wall – a barrier consisting of a network of walls, fences, watchtowers, checkpoints – has been planned to cut for most of its length of about 709 kilometers right into the West Bank, with only 15 percent of it actually following the Green Line of 1967. It is therefore that the International Court of Justice had ruled in 2004 that the section of this barrier, that is not built on the internationally recognized Green Line, is in fact illegal. According to the United Nations' Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, by the end of June this year of the 703 kilometers some 413 have been completed.