debkafile reports: The “cash-strapped” Palestinian Fatah and Hamas direct large-scale funds to military preparations for their coming showdown

While deep in long, fruitless talks with Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya, Palestinian Authority chairman Abu Mazen over the weekend issued secret directives for mobilizing recruits to his private army and the release of cash from the “Arafat Fund” to pay their wages.
This is reported by debkafile‘s exclusive sources.
Fatah and Hamas are organizing their forces for the armed showdown building up between them over top spot in Palestinian government.
Abu Mazen controls the Arafat Fund, whose capital is estimated $ billion – certainly enough to cover the public sector payroll and ease humanitarian distress in the Palestinian territories. Instead, his Fatah released $25,000 to each of the 15 or 16 terrorist groups under its aegis, thereby following in the footsteps of the late Arafat, who used this secret nest-egg to finance his war campaign against Israel.
The total remitted by Abbas to these groups runs to around $9 million.
Hamas correspondingly distributed to each member of its armed Ezz e-Din al-Qassam force, a large food package to keep him and his family supplied for two weeks plus the sum of INS250.
Hamas leaders now threaten that should it be toppled or starved out of office by the international funding boycott, it will launch a “super-intifada” against Israel in the first stage and across the entire Middle East in the next stage, implying its ability to harness fraternal wings of the Muslim Brotherhood.
In Damascus, debkafile‘s Middle East sources report that a delegation of European Union officials has been trying for the past two weeks to persuade Hamas’s senior leaders, Khaled Meshaal, Mussa Abu Marzouk and Mohammed Nazal, to accept a formula to de-freeze donations for the Palestinians. This formula is based on the 2002 Saudi peace proposal that promised Israel normal relations with the Arab states for withdrawing to the pre-1967 war lines and accepting the 1948 Palestinians refugees’ rights of return.