RAMALLAH, WEST BANK — Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas installed an emergency government Sunday and declared the parliament led by his Hamas rivals powerless, a move that paves the way for an end to a Western financial embargo.
U.S. officials said they expected aid to flow quickly to the West Bank, but the fate of residents in the Gaza Strip remained unclear after Hamas militants seized military control of the tiny coastal area last week. American and Israeli officials said they would treat the territories as separate entities, supporting Abbas' Fatah faction in the West Bank and squeezing Hamas in Gaza.
The emergence of rival governments in Gaza and the West Bank in effect reduced to factional strongholds what Palestinians had hoped would one day become their united, independent state.
But Abbas and his new prime minister, Salam Fayyad, pledged Sunday not to abandon Gaza's 1.5 million residents. They said their government had a legal obligation to continue paying salaries to about 70,000 public employees in Hamas-controlled Gaza, including the police, many of whom were the targets of the Hamas takeover.
"You are in our hearts and at the top of our priorities and programs," Fayyad said of Palestinians in Gaza during a speech in Ramallah after he took his oath.
Their pledges underscored the complexity of the rift created by Hamas' military victory and raised questions about whether Western donors could exploit the divide to keep Gaza cut off.
Hamas' lightning offensive last week capped a feud that had convulsed Gaza intermittently since the group defeated Fatah in parliamentary elections in January 2006. Because Hamas calls for Israel's destruction, the West had boycotted the new government. To quell the violence and ease its diplomatic isolation, Hamas reluctantly brought Fatah into the Cabinet in March, but the alliance unraveled.
Last week's fighting, which killed about 100 Palestinians, is likely to leave the fenced-in coastal strip further isolated and impoverished. On Sunday, an Israeli fuel company halted deliveries to gasoline stations in Gaza, and hundreds of fleeing residents jammed a border-crossing tunnel, only to find it closed on the Israeli side.
In Gaza, deposed Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas called the new government illegal and insisted that he remained in charge.
