Gaza, November 14: Hamas authorities have called off annual Palestinian Independence Day celebrations in the Gaza Strip, ordering its schools and offices to remain open as usual when the holiday falls on Sunday, officials said on Friday.
The decision pointed up the tensions between Hamas Islamists and the secular Fatah movement, still at odds two years after Hamas seized control of coastal Gaza.
Khaled Radi, a spokesman for Gaza’s Education Ministry, said Sunday would be “a regular school day,” with some lessons devoted to discussion of the holiday launched by the late Yasser Arafat, a Fatah founder, who symbolically declared Palestinian independence on November 15, 1988.
Hamas, founded a year before Arafat’s declaration, rejects Fatah’s vision of a two-state solution alongside Israel, does not recognise it and seeks to supplant Israel with an Islamist state, though some Hamas leaders have proposed an extended truce with the Jewish state.
A senior Fatah official, Zeyad Abu Ein, accused Hamas of “cancelling one of our greatest national holidays” and said the step would “remind the Palestinian people in Gaza of Israeli occupation and suppression of such celebrations.”
Israel withdrew its forces from the Gaza Strip in 2005 but remains in control of the territory’s land and sea frontiers.
Despite Hamas’s decision, schools supervised by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), attended by about half of Gaza’s 450,000 students, would customarily not hold classes on Sunday, a spokesman said.
Gaza’s banks would also stay shut for the day as they are supervised by the Palestinian Monteary Fund, based in the Fatah-dominated West Bank where the holiday was expected to be observed as usual.
–Agencies–