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Six people were wounded today in fighting in Gaza between Palestinian police and gunmen demanding jobs.
Gunmen belonging mainly to Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades blocked off the main road leading to the Erez terminal and exchanged fire with security forces in a two-hour long battle.
Erez is used mainly by Palestinian officials to cross into Israel. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas's motorcade was on its way to Tel Aviv at the time for a follow-up meeting with Americans, Egyptians, Europeans, and Israelis on the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
The gunmen then took the battle to Gaza City, shooting at a police station and in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Machine gun fire echoed throughout the city, ricocheting off buildings and shops, as police sirens wailed up and down the streets.
The gunmen were demanding jobs, and in some instances unpaid wages. Though this is not the first time they have done so, this latest episode comes at a critical time.
The cash-strapped authority is finding it increasingly difficult to pay the salaries of the about 70,000 security personnel it employs as it is, especially in the face of rising international pressure on the newly-elected Hamas government.
Much-needed foreign aid has been recalled by the United States, with other governments threatening to do the same, while Israel is withholding tax revenues owed to the Palestinian Authority amounting to some $52m (£30m) a month.
All of this is happening at a time that Gaza faces an unprecedented food shortage.
Flour stocks have run out and other staples are nearly depleted due to Israel's nearly two-month closure of the al-Mintar commercial crossing into the coastal strip. A temporary arrangement was reached yesterday to allow the entry of some humanitarian aid, although no exports are being allowed out of Gaza, and a permanent solution to the border crisis has yet to be reached.
Gaza's economy is losing about $600,000 a day because of the closure, which has forced some farmers to feed their rotting vegetables to goats, while others are reduced to selling what remains of their marked-for-export produce in bulk on donkey carts in the city, charging only £1 for 20 kg of tomatoes on the vine. Most PA employees were paid their salaries last month. But the future does not look so promising, and today's events gave us a small sample of what to expect if conditions worsen.
According to the United Nations, PA salaries support 1 million people in Gaza - one third of the Palestinian population. In an area where 64% of Palestinians live under the $2 a day poverty line, the implications of such a scenario would be calamitous.
The wage fears are not limited to security forces, which many argue do need to be streamlined - municipality workers have been on strike for two days protesting late wages. Uncollected rubbish has piled up throughout the city, with many neighbourhoods opting to burn it to prevent rats from nesting.
Security will suffer in the long term: James Wolfensohn, the international community's envoy, recently warned that the Palestinian Authority could face imminent collapse unless aid was continued, leading to more violence and chaos.
As director of the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs David Shearer told me last week, if the money for the security forces payroll runs out there will be 70,000 very unhappy people running around Gaza, most of them armed.
These men, along with the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades members, will constitute one of the biggest challenges for the upcoming government. The brigades, along with Islamic Jihad and the Marxist PFLP, are responsible for the bulk of rocket attacks against Israel and for kidnappings of foreigners, not Hamas. They are loose cannons, used to the days of quick and easy payoffs, and are now demanding to be absorbed into an already bloated and unsustainable security apparatus. Along with Israeli moves and western aid cuts, their actions threaten to destabilize the nascent Palestinian government before it even gets started.
How Hamas will deal with such threats remains to be seen, especially in the face of increasing international pressure and isolation.
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