Palestinians are on the hunt by their fellow brethren inside and outside their territories, writes Rasha Saad The suffering of displaced Palestinians was the focus of Arab pundits this week. In the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper Jihad Al-Khazen wrote that Palestinian blood has stained the hands of other Palestinians. Last Saturday, 11 people were killed and tens were wounded, while 181 Palestinians took refuge in Israel. Of the 22 Palestinians treated in Israel, 16 stayed in hospitals there. Earlier, a 26 July blast caused the death of five Hamas members and one girl. The incidents were due to an ongoing power struggle between Hamas and Fatah. Al-Khazen refused to accuse either of the movements with treason. However, he called on the Palestinian leaders to acknowledge their failures and step down. "I am not accusing Hamas or Fatah of treason. They are both militant movements that want to liberate Palestine, each in its own way. However, I accuse all Palestinian leaders of failing to lead the Palestinians and as such call upon them to step down." Al-Khazen even called on Egypt and Jordan to re-impose their direct rule on Gaza and the West Bank, "as the Palestinians are not eligible for self-rule". Al-Khazen does not expect any of his two calls to happen. "The Palestinian leaders who succeeded where Israel failed -- as they destroyed their own cause by themselves -- will not step down. Nor will Egypt and Jordan intervene. The Palestinian people will keep paying the price of failure and even the crime." Al-Khazen expects Israel to invade the Strip once again. He quoted Defence Minister Ehud Barak who openly said this week that those calling for an assault on Gaza would not have to wait for long. Al-Khazen also referred to Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi statements that Israel knew where Gilad Shalit is being kept and by whom. "If we link Ashkenazi's slip of the tongue to Barak's threat and the ongoing Israeli media efforts to display the horrors committed in Gaza, we perceive a planned preparation for the invasion of the Strip," Al-Khazen wrote. Al-Khazen warns that if this happens, Israel will be met with international support and Arab silence. "Neither the United States nor Israel and Arab countries are responsible for the disaster. The Palestinian factions are to blame. For they prove every day that they are losers, ineligible to rule and even to mount resistance. For this reason, they must have mercy on the Palestinians and step down," Al-Khazen concluded. In the pan-Arab London-based Asharq Al-Awsat, Abdul-Rahman Al-Rashed wrote that when Yasser Arafat first returned to Gaza from his exile in Tunisia in 1994, it might have occurred to him that the day would come when his men would escape from Gaza to Israel. His fear at the time, when he returned with his leaders and Palestinian forces from the Diaspora, Al-Rashed wrote, was that Israel might reoccupy the land they restored and disperse them once again. Al-Rashed also wrote that it is doubtful that it ever occurred to President Mahmoud Abbas, when he agreed that Hamas participates in national elections, that the day would come when Hamas police would chase his followers and make them seek refuge in Israel or be imprisoned in the jails of Gaza, ruled by Hamas. "Palestinians are on the hunt, they are pursued by the guns of their government, which claims to be their best defender. They fled their own government's pursuit, jails, and torture to Israel, which played its usual role of expelling them again." However, Al-Rashed tells another story on Palestinian displacement on Iraq's northern border, "where another forgotten tragedy unfolds of the thousands of stranded Palestinians who have been living in tents on the aid of international organisations for the past two years." They were expelled by the new Iraqi regime and refused entry by the Syrians. Their tents are scattered in various areas, and the most miserable were put up in an arid desert where UN employees take care of them. Al-Rashed also refers to other Palestinian refugees who have been refused entry by both Syria and Iraq and who live in a camp on the Iraqi-Syrian border. Syria prevents them from entering its territory while Iraq refuses their return to live in Iraq. These refugees live under harsh conditions, and international organisations reported that so far 12 have died for lack of medical care. "The Palestinian leaders should be ashamed of bragging about their empty rhetoric and bravado, and should pay attention to addressing the harsh living conditions of approximately three million refugees," Al-Rashed wrote. Al-Rashed also wrote that in this cruel world only distant countries, which we sometimes dare to condemn, have displayed a measure of humanity and offered genuine assistance to the Palestinian refugees. Al-Rashed pointed out that Sweden and Finland have granted several hundred entry visas to those poor Palestinian refugees after the Arab countries refused them entry. Also in Al-Hayat newspaper, Patrick Seale, wrote on what he described as the "Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process." He noted the bleak prospects of the Middle East peace process. "Political turmoil and uncertainty in both Israel and the United States have now brought an end to the grim farce of Middle East peacemaking," Seale wrote. Under the faltering sponsorship of US President George W Bush, Seale explained, no discernible progress has been achieved since the Annapolis summit of November 2007, and no progress can be expected for the next several months until new leaders emerge in both Israel and the US. "Bush, and his hapless Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, must bear the prime responsibility for the failure. They have been unwilling -- or unable -- to put the slightest pressure on Israel, even to insist that it honours its verbal commitments to freeze settlements and evacuate illegal outposts," Seale charges. But they are not the only culprits. According to Seale, the fratricidal feud between Fatah and Hamas has set back the Palestinians' hopes for an independent state of their own. "They continue to fight each other, as if unaware that their cause is disappearing before their eyes. Factionalism has been the ruin of the Palestinians ever since they first confronted militant Zionism under the British Mandate between the two world wars." The political impotence of the wider Arab world, Seale wrote, has also played its part in the failure of the peace process. Although Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates have generously paid the July salaries of tens of thousands of Palestinian civil servants, Seale explains, the Arab oil states have not used their colossal financial power to bring pressure to bear on the US on the Palestinians' behalf. "Arab oil wealth has still not been converted into political power," Seale added
