Haniyeh calls on Palestinians to prevent civil war

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas on Wednesday called on the Palestinians to work to prevent internal violence from exploding into an all-out civil war. "We stress the necessity of sparing the Palestinian people any internal confrontations and to avoid using weapons as a medium for dialogue and to focus on dialogue only to solve our differences," he said before a Cabinet meeting. "The differences exist, they are there, but this does not mean that they should be solved by gunfire." Hamas and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah group have been engaged in bloody street battles that have killed 35 Palestinians over the past month.