Clashes erupt at Gaza border on ‘return’ protest anniversary

Bloomberg

Palestinian demonstrators and Israeli soldiers clashed at the Gaza border on Saturday, the one-year anniversary of Hamas-led protests to draw attention to the territory’s plight.
About 50,000 protesters had joined the rally, with one Palestinian shot dead by Israeli forces and a few dozen needing treatment for tear-gas exposure, according to Palestinian reports. The army said it was using live fire and riot-dispersal methods to control those hurling grenades and explosives.
Still, for the first time since the protest campaign began a year ago, Hamas deployed units to keep demonstrators away from the frontier fence and limit confrontations with soldiers. That came amid efforts by Egyptian mediators to arrange a package of economic incentives for Gaza if the border remained peaceful.
The protests demand a return to lands Palestinians left or were expelled from in the 1948 war around Israel’s creation, but their more immediate goal is to refocus attention on the fate of stateless Palestinians.
The anniversary march comes at a sensitive time for both sides, with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu facing a tight April 9 re-election battle in which his Gaza policy has drawn criticism, and Hamas the target of rare public outrage over wretched conditions in the blockaded coastal strip they have run for 12 years.
The protests’ original goal “was to remind the world of the Palestinians’ legitimate ‘Right of Return’ back to their homes they were forced to leave,” said Jamal Abu Lasheen, a political analyst at Gaza’s Abdulla Hourani Center for Studies and Research. “This goal was neglected and the marches were used to exert pressure on Israel” to improve living conditions.
Israel and Egypt have blockaded Gaza since Hamas seized power in 2007, confining 2 million people to a patch of land that’s the third-most densely-populated polity in the world. Towns and cities are marked by neglect and damage from repeated wars pitting the extremist militants against the Israeli military. Infrastructure is shattered, power is spotty and clean water a luxury.
Hamas has spent tens of millions of dollars on rockets and attack tunnels meant to cross the border into Israel, while almost 80 percent of the population depends on aid.
Conditions worsened two years ago when the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority set out to suffocate Hamas financially and force it to cede control of Gaza.
When the border protests began last March as a largely grassroots effort, Hamas quickly took control of them as a useful outlet for popular dissatisfaction.
Earlier this month, Hamas brutally suppressed rare anti-regime protests about living conditions in Gaza, then fired a missile deep into Israel, drawing retaliatory airstrikes that refocussed attention on that conflict. As with a March 14 rocket attack on Tel Aviv, Hamas said the launch was an accident.
“Tension with Israel distracts from the outrage with Hamas’s rule,” said Fathi Sabba, a political analyst and president of the Gaza-based Palestinian Institute for Communication and Development. “In times of escalation with Israel, no one criticises Hamas and all the Palestinians unite against the Israeli aggression.”
More than 260 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops in the yearlong protest campaign. In recent months the weekly Friday protests have been bolstered by night-time riots in which Hamas-led “confusion units” hurl explosives at soldiers and try to cut through the border fence.