GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories: The Palestinian Authority has paid salaries to its West Bank employees this month but not those in Gaza, officials said Monday, amid an ongoing split with the strip's Islamist rulers Hamas.

It was not immediately clear why the salaries had not been paid and if the delay was temporary, but it comes as relations between the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority and Hamas are at rock bottom.

Last month, PA president Mahmud Abbas accused Hamas of planning a failed assassination attempt on his prime minister, who was on a rare visit to Gaza.

But protests since along the Gaza border that have led to clashes in which Israeli forces have killed 31 Palestinians have led to expressions of support for Gazans from Abbas.

"Salaries were paid into banks in the West Bank and not in Gaza," Arif Abu Jarad, head of the union representing PA employees in the Gaza Strip, told AFP.

"There is a state of anger among staff in the strip," he added, saying they were having emergency meetings against this "terrible crime".

A source in the finance ministry in Ramallah, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the salaries had been paid in the West Bank but not Gaza.

He refused to give more details on the decision.

Employees in Gaza waited in vain for salaries at banks, an AFP photographer said.

The PA has kept paying its tens of thousands of employees in Gaza despite most not going to work since Hamas seized control of the territory from the PA in a 2007 near civil war.

Analysts say cutting the salaries would seek to increase discontent in the Gaza Strip, putting more pressure on Hamas.

Multiple reconciliation attempts between the two factions have failed, most recently an Egyptian-brokered deal signed in October.

Hugh Lovatt, Israel and Palestine fellow with the European Council of Foreign Relations think-tank, said the halt to payments, if confirmed, would represent Abbas "doubling down" on threats.

"This comes against the backdrop of increasing attempts by Abbas to impose sanctions on Hamas and Gazans," he told AFP.

"I see this as one more step." — AFP</s>More than 1,400 have been wounded in clashes between Palestinian protesters and the Israeli military. The media has barely noticed.Gaza is back in the headlines, grabbing, if only for a moment, the fickle international spotlight. The two million Palestinians living in the 141-square-mile spit that hugs the Mediterranean have no such luxury. They cannot escape the misery, manufactured by powers greater than themselves, that has been Gaza's fate for much of the last generation.Gaza today is a prison, bound to its north by Israel and its south and east by Egypt, both of which for their own reasons are conspiring to continue its penury and isolation. To the west lies the Mediterranean, deceptively open but just as impenetrable. In a faraway time Gaza was once an entrepot-a thriving seaport on the Mediterranean linking the west with the Arab heartland to the east. Its location along the hotly contested Mediterranean coast, where an abundance of natural gas has recently been discovered, is a cruel reminder of what Gaza - which the World Bank warns will be uninhabitable by 2020 if current policies continue - could be.In recent days 17 Palestinians have been shot and killed by Israeli forces positioned along the 32-mile fortified border separating Israel from the impoverished enclave. An extraordinary 1,416 have been wounded in clashes between Palestinian protesters and the military, including 750 injured by live fire.The UN Security Council was poised to approve a statement expressing "grave concern at the situation at the border," reaffirming "the right to peaceful protest" and expressing the Council's "sorrow at the loss of innocent Palestinian lives." The draft called "for respect for international human rights law and international humanitarian law, including protection of civilians." Council members "called upon all sides to exercise restraint and prevent a further escalation," and endorsed an "independent and transparent investigation" of the confrontations."As for a commission of inquiry - there won't be one," Minister of Security Avigdor Lieberman flatly stated to Israel Army Radio." Israeli soldiers did what was necessary. I think all our soldiers deserve a medal."The scale of the violence, not seen since the war between Israel and Gaza in 2014, even muscled its way into the Pope's Easter address, which called for "reconciliation for the Holy Land, also experiencing in these days the wounds of ongoing conflict that do not spare the defenseless."The confrontations were the opening volley in planned Palestinian protests that are meant to culminate on May 15 in a massive nonviolent march by Gazans, more than two thirds of whom are refugees or their descendants, across the tense border to Israel.Those demonstrating opposite Israeli troops are the grandchildren of the refugees memorialized in 1957 by then-chief of staff Moshe Dayan as "a surging sea of hatred and vengeance, yearning for the day that the tranquility blunts our alertness.... Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years have they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelt."A decade later, Dayan, as minister of security, made the momentous decision to remove the border fences, erasing the border that separated the Palestinians living in the just-conquered Gaza Strip and West Bank from Israel. In 1982, Security Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the removal of the two conscripts manning a portable checkpoint that marked the all-but-invisible border between Israel and Gaza. For a generation, Palestinians traveled all but unhindered across the old border, providing grist for the myth of Israel's "benevolent occupation." That all came crashing down in the waning days of 1987, when a traffic accident in Gaza sparked the first intifada (uprising) against Israel.Thus began decades of restrictions on Palestinian movement that have found their most destructive expression in the permanent siege of Gaza.Prime Minister Ariel Sharon startled many when he ordered the removal of all settlements and troops from Gaza in September 2005, not least PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas, who never believed until Israeli forces locked the gate at the Karni crossing that Sharon would make good on his promise.Abbas and most everyone else did not understand that Sharon was not leaving Gaza. He was unilaterally redefining Israel's relationship with it. Israel, notwithstanding its historic 1993 deal with the PLO, remained an occupying power constrained by its international obligations to safeguard the welfare of the local population. After the Gaza disengagement, Israel unilaterally redefined Gaza as enemy territory, where the rules of war, rather than the obligations of occupation, apply. But for Israel's retreat, the draconian restrictions on Palestinian movement, production, and commerce, the continuing "siege" on Gazans heartlessly described as a "diet" by a Sharon confidante, would have been all but impossible.For Israel in this new era, the border with Gaza has become sacrosanct, both as a symbol and as an instrument of Israeli sovereignty-to be defended, as we have seen, without mercy for the refugees pressing against the barbed wire. Palestinians may have no use for a border that constrains them and confers upon them nothing but misery and the bitter memory of their personal and national defeat.Even when the Trump White House has an idea - the latest being a conference on humanitarian aid for Gaza - it has no enthusiasm for its success. In the absence of any consensual diplomatic process that can offer an alternative, moderating narrative, the "March of Return" - set to culminate on May 15 - and Israel's ferocious defense of the border, will prevail.Geoffrey Aronson is chairman and co-founder of The Mortons Group and a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute.</s>GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Cross-border fighting between Gaza and Israel, touched off by Israel's killing of a top militant leader, showed no signs of letting up on its third day Sunday. Gaza militants fired dozens of rockets at Israeli towns, hitting an empty school, and Israeli airstrikes killed three Gazans, including a boy and a farm guard.

Egypt tried to mediate but failed to end the worst violence in more than a year that has killed 18 Gazans, all but two of them militants, and disrupted the lives of some 1 million Israelis living in Gaza rocket range.

Even so, Israel and Gaza's Hamas rulers seemed eager to avoid a full-scale conflict. A three-week war in three years ago left both sides badly bruised, Israel in the diplomatic arena and Hamas on the battlefield.

In the current round, Hamas has pointedly kept its large rocket arsenal and thousands of fighters out of the confrontation, even though it has not tried to stop two smaller Gaza groups, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees, from launching rockets and mortars.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak acknowledged that Hamas did not take part in the rocket salvos. Up to now Israel has blamed Hamas for all violence from Gaza because it rules the territory.

Israel's military chief, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, said Sunday that "we are not interested in escalation in and of itself."

On a visit to southern Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged the airstrikes would continue as long as necessary. "We have a clear policy: we will hit anyone who plans to harm us, who prepares to harm us and who harms us," he said in a meeting with local leaders.

Israel said it launched Friday's initial airstrike, which killed PRC leader Zuhair al-Qaissi in a car in downtown Gaza, to stop a plan by his splinter group to infiltrate into Israel through Egypt's lawless Sinai Peninsula. Israel says the PRC was behind an attack on the border in August, killing eight Israelis.

Palestinians across the political spectrum accused Israel of deliberately escalating tensions. The groups involved in firing rockets dismissed truce offers presented by Egypt.

"We will not give calm for free, and the blood of our leaders and martyrs will not be spilled in vain," said a PRC spokesman who uses the nom de guerre Abu Mujahed.

Egypt was trying to broker a truce but insisted Israel stop its airstrikes first, said Yasser Othman, Egypt's envoy to the Palestinian Authority. Representatives of militant groups were in Cairo for talks.

In the past, similar flare-ups have died out by themselves or with informal cease-fires negotiated by third parties, but there is always a danger of sudden escalation if an attack by either side causes multiple casualties.

An uneasy informal truce has held on the Gaza-Israel border since the Gaza war that started at the end of 2008, though smaller Gaza groups fire rockets and mortars from time to time with Hamas looking the other way.

Hamas itself has largely observed the truce, in part because it has made safeguarding its five-year-old rule in Gaza a priority and does not want to provoke harsh Israeli retaliation.

Trying to claim a middle ground, Hamas leaders issued fiery statements Sunday in support of those firing rockets, but Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh also noted that "the brothers in Egypt are working around the clock to stop the (Israeli) aggression."

The U.S. and the U.N. called on both sides to show restraint.

Israeli airstrikes Sunday killed a 12-year-old boy, a 60-year-old farm guard and a militant, said Gaza health official Adham Abu Salmia. The boy was hit while walking with a friend to school in the northern town of Jebaliya and the guard died in Gaza City while walking with his dog, who was also killed, he said. The militant was killed at a rocket launching site, he said.

Hundreds of mourners attended funerals in two Gaza towns Sunday. Women wailed and men chanted slogans demanding revenge for the deaths, as militants fired guns into the air. The boy's body was draped in the black flag of the Islamic Jihad militant group.

On Sunday, Palestinians fired more than 30 rockets at southern Israel. One struck the courtyard of an empty school in Beersheba, police said. Sunday is a school day in Israel, but schools in rocket range were closed to try to prevent casualties.

Three Israelis have been hurt by rocket fire since Friday, two of them seriously, the Defense Ministry said.

Israel claimed success in the first major battlefield test of its of its Iron Dome anti-missile system, which intercepted 30 of more than 120 rockets fired from Gaza since Friday, Barak told Israel's weekly Cabinet meeting, according to a statement from his office. He said anti-rocket batteries were deployed near three southern cities close to Gaza.

Laub reported from Ramallah, West Bank. Associated Press writer Aron Heller in Jerusalem contributed.</s>Israel's razing of a smuggling tunnel across the border from Gaza killed seven Palestinian gunmen, according to militant groups, coming as rivals Hamas and the Palestinian Authority work toward a new bid at a unity government. Julian Satterthwaite reports.
The Palestinian Authority pays salaries to its West Bank staff but not to staff in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, amid growing disputes between the two groups.