Palestinian fighting escalates

JERUSALEM -- Gunmen of rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah sharply escalated their fight for supremacy yesterday, with Hamas taking over much of the northern Gaza Strip in what is beginning to look increasingly like a civil war.

Five days of revenge attacks on individuals -- including executions, kneecappings, and tossing handcuffed prisoners off tall apartment towers -- yesterday turned into something larger and more organized: attacks on symbols of power and the deployment of military units. About 25 Palestinians were killed and more than 100 wounded, Palestinian medics said.

In one Hamas attack on a Fatah security headquarters in northern Gaza near Jabaliya Camp, at least 21 Palestinians were reported killed and 60 wounded, said Moaweya Hassanein of the Palestinian Health Ministry.

After a senior Fatah leader in northern Gaza, Jamal Abu alJediyan, was killed on Monday, Fatah's elite Presidential Guards, who are being trained by the United States and its allies, fired rocket-propelled grenades at the house of Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, of Hamas, in the Shati Refugee Camp near Gaza City.

An hour later, Hamas's military wing fired four mortar shells at the presidential office compound of Mahmoud Abbas, of Fatah, who is in the West Bank, a Fatah spokesman, Tawfiq Abu Khoussa, said in a telephone interview.

"Hamas is seeking a military coup against the Palestinian Authority," he said.

Hamas made a similar accusation against Fatah. Hamas, which has an Islamist ideology, demanded that security forces loyal to Fatah, the more nationalist and secular movement, abandon their positions in northern and central Gaza.

Fatah's leaders said last night that they would suspend participation in the unity government with Hamas, which began in March, until the fighting ends.

That agreement to govern jointly, negotiated under Saudi auspices, put Fatah ministers into a Hamas-led government in an effort to secure renewed international aid and recognition and to stop what was already serious fighting between the two factions.

But the new government has failed to achieve either goal, and it appeared to many in Gaza that the gunmen were not listening to their political leaders. Abbas is under increasing pressure to abandon the unity government he championed and to try once again to order new elections, which Hamas has said it will oppose by any means.

The head of the Egyptian mediation team, Lieutenant Colonel Burhan Hamad, said that neither side responded to his call yesterday to hold truce talks. "It seems they don't want to come," said Hamad, who has brokered several brief cease-fires between the two. "We must make them ashamed of themselves. They have killed all hope. They have killed the future."

He said neither side had the weaponry required to produce "a decisive victory."

Talal Okal, a Gazan political scientist, described what could be coming. "Tonight, we may find ourselves at the beginning of a civil war," he said. "If Abbas decides to move his security forces onto the attack, and not to only defend, we'll find ourselves in a much wider cycle."

Fatah forces were ordered last evening to defend their positions and counter "a coup against the president and against the Palestinian Authority and national unity government."

The streets of Gazan cities were once again empty of pedestrians and cars. People ventured out to buy food, but only to the next building, and parents kept children out of school.

At Shifa Hospital in Gaza, which Hamas gunmen patrolled, bodies of four Hamas fighters lay on the floor of the emergency room, including Muhammad al-Mqeir, 25. His closest friend called him a martyr, even though he was killed by another Palestinian, from Fatah. "They are not Palestinians; they are lost people," the friend said of Fatah. Doctors said that the emergency room was overloaded and that the hospital was running short of blood.

After warning Fatah, Hamas attacked a Fatah-affiliated security headquarters in Gaza City, and declared northern Gaza "a closed military zone."

An estimated 200 Hamas fighters surrounded Fatah security headquarters there, firing mortar shells and grenades at the compound, where some 500 security officers were positioned. The headquarters fell to Hamas. Hamas gunmen also exchanged fire with Fatah forces at the southern security headquarters in the southern town of Khan Yunis. There, the two sides fought a gun battle near a hospital. Fifteen children attending a kindergarten in the line of fire were rushed into the hospital, which is financed largely by European donations.

Angering Hamas, Fatah militants abducted and killed the nephew of Abdel Aziz Rantisi, the Hamas leader assassinated by Israel in April 2004.

Hamas gunmen attacked the home of a Fatah security official with mortars and grenades, killing his 14-year-old son and three women inside, security officials said. Other Fatah gunmen stormed the house of a Hamas lawmaker and burned it down.

Fatah forces also attacked the headquarters, in Gaza, of Hamas's television station, Al Aksa TV, and began to broadcast Fatah songs, but Hamas said later that it had repelled the attack.

In the West Bank, where Fatah is stronger and the Israeli occupation forces keep Hamas fighters underground, Fatah's Presidential Guards took over the Ramallah offices of Al Aksa TV and confiscated equipment.

Also in the West Bank, Fatah men kidnapped a deputy minister from Hamas, one of the few Hamas Cabinet members and legislators not already in Israeli military jails, part of Israel's effort to keep pressure on Hamas.

Since Monday morning, at least 43 Palestinians have died in the renewed fighting, after more than 50 had died in the previous outburst last month that ended in a brief cease-fire mediated by the Egyptians.

A Hamas spokesman, Fawzi Barhoum, accused Fatah, in alliance with Israel and the United States, of trying to destroy Hamas and overturn the results of elections held in January 2006, in which Hamas won a legislative majority. "They crossed all the red lines," he said of Fatah after the second straight day that Haniya's house was fired upon.

Sami Abu Zuhri, another Hamas spokesman, said: "Those we sit with from Fatah have no control on the ground. These groups have relations with the US administration and Israel." Hamas believes that Abbas's aide, Muhammad Dahlan, is controlling the Fatah forces; Zuhri added: "It's an international and regional plan aiming to eliminate Hamas."