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Hamas says Abbas accidentally paid its fighters
GAZA (Reuters) - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's government accidentally paid salaries to almost half the members of rival Hamas's security force before noticing the error, officials said on Wednesday.
They said Abbas's Finance Ministry ordered Tuesday's payouts to 2,600 members of the Hamas Executive Force to be reversed, but hundreds of fighters had managed to withdraw funds.
"To their surprise, they got phone calls telling them to get their salaries. They rushed to the bank," said an official in the Hamas-led administration in Gaza.
The Executive Force routed Abbas's secular Fatah faction in a Gazan civil war in June. That led the president to fire the Hamas-led government and form a Western-backed cabinet that has received foreign donor aid denied the Islamists.
Asked about the incident, Abbas's cabinet secretary Sadi al-Kronz told Reuters: "This issue was dealt with, and we have no comment."
The Gaza official said the deposits were part of a general disbursement to civil servants meant to cover July salaries as well as 30 percent of the wages that went unpaid after Hamas was voted into power last year, prompting the Western aid embargo.
The official said the total deposits surpassed $2 million.
The United States and European Union define Hamas, which has spearheaded an almost 7-year-old Palestinian uprising against Israel, as a terrorist group.
Salam Fayyad, the new prime minister in Abbas's government, resumed paying wages last month to 133,000 Palestinian civil servants, but excluded 19,000 Hamas appointees.
