page_title: United States involvement in regime change
section_title: 2006–2007: Palestinian territories
hierarchical_section_title: United States involvement in regime change / 1991–present: Post-Cold War / 2000s / 2006–2007: Palestinian territories
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (West Bank and Gaza Strip), marked by the Green Line. Based on Reference Map: occupied Palestinian territory: Overview Map, as of December 2011. Published by United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHAoPt), 25 January 2012 العربية: خريطة للأراضي الفلسطينية المحتلة (الضفة الغربية وقطاع غزة) ، مميزة بالخط الأخضر. استنادًا إلى الخريطة المرجعية: "الأراضي الفلسطينية المحتلة: خريطة عامة" ، اعتبارًا من ديسمبر 2011. تم النشر بواسطة مكتب الأمم المتحدة لتنسيق الشؤون الإنسانية (OCHAoPt ) ، 25 يناير 2012
context_page_description: United States involvement in regime change has entailed both overt and covert actions aimed at altering, replacing, or preserving foreign governments. In the latter half of the 19th century, the U.S. government initiated actions for regime change mainly in Latin America and the southwest Pacific, including the Spanish–American and Philippine–American wars. At the onset of the 20th century, the United States shaped or installed governments in many countries around the world, including neighbors Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.
  During World War II, the United States helped overthrow many Nazi Germany or imperial Japanese puppet regimes. Examples include regimes in the Philippines, Korea, the Eastern portion of China, and much of Europe. United States forces were also instrumental in ending the rule of Adolf Hitler over Germany and of Benito Mussolini over Italy.
context_section_description: The U.S. government pressured the Fatah faction of the Palestinian leadership to topple the Hamas government of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. The Bush Administration was displeased with the government formed by Hamas, which won 56 percent of the seats in the Palestinian legislative election of 2006. The U.S. government set up a secret training and armaments program that received tens of millions of dollars in Congressional funding, but also, like in the Iran-contra scandal, a more secret Congress-circumventing source of funding for Fatah to launch a bloody war against the Haniyeh government. The war was brutal, with many casualties and with Fatah kidnapping and torturing civilian leaders of Hamas, sometimes in front of their own families, and setting fire to a university in Gaza. When the government of Saudi Arabia attempted to negotiate a truce between the sides so as to avoid a wide-scale Palestinian civil war, the U.S. government pressured Fatah to reject the Saudi plan and to continue the effort to topple the Haniyeh government. Ultimately, the Haniyeh government was prevented from ruling over all of the Palestinian territories, with Hamas retreating to the Gaza strip and Fatah retreating to the West Bank.
caption: Occupied Palestinian Territories
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