Reuters Reports:
Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh crossed into Gaza on Thursday, leaving behind money donated by Muslim states, hours after Israel blocked the Hamas leader from returning from a fund-raising tour with $35 million.
The test of wills along the Egyptian frontier racheted up tensions in the Gaza Strip, where a political showdown between Hamas and the rival Fatah movement of moderate President Mahmoud Abbas has boiled over in recent days into a series of killings.Palestinian officials and Western diplomats said Haniyeh had planned to enter the impoverished Gaza Strip from Egypt through the Rafah border crossing with $35 million of cash in suitcases.
But Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz ordered the crossing closed and European monitors left the area, keeping Haniyeh cooling his heels for hours on the Egyptian side.
Late in the evening, a member of Haniyeh's delegation said the prime minister had crossed into the Palestinian terminal at Rafah. Hamas sources said the money had stayed in Egypt with two delegation officials who would sort out what to do with it.
In the past two weeks, Haniyeh visited countries including Iran, Qatar and Sudan to raise money for his government, which has struggled to function despite international sanctions imposed after Hamas's election win in January.
Israel, the United States and the European Union regard Hamas, which is sworn to Israel's destruction, as a terrorist organization, and imposed sanctions after the Islamist group rejected their demands to recognize the Jewish state, renounce violence and accept existing interim peace accords.
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