Palestine ministers visit Gaza over employee dispute

A delegation of Palestinian ministers and senior officials from the West Bank-based national consensus government arrived in Gaza on Sunday in a bid to tackle a thorny dispute over employees. The delegation arrived a day after two small bombs exploded in Gaza City, causing no injuries and only slight damage in a develo4pment, highlighting growing security problems in the tiny coastal enclave. 

“Some 40 government officials, among them eight ministers, crossed the Beit Hanun terminal to enter the Gaza Strip,” a senior official at the border said, referring to the Erez crossing. Central to the visit is the question of government employees which has been a major point of dispute between the Fatah faction of president Mahmud Abbas, which is based in the West Bank, and the rival Islamist Hamas movement, whose power base is in Gaza. Since 2014, when the two factions tried to bury the hatchet after years of bitter and bloody rivalry, Hamas has demanded that the government regulate the salaries of its 50,000 employees who have been on the books since the Islamists seized power in the tiny enclave in 2007.