MIDDLE EAST:Fatah threatened yesterday to quit the Palestinian government after forces loyal to its Hamas coalition partner seized a number of Fatah-controlled security posts in the Gaza Strip and ordered others to surrender.
Some 20 people have died since the latest round of fighting between the factions flared at the weekend. As each accused the other of mounting a coup, Hamas fighters appeared to be gaining the upper hand.
The fighting intensified yesterday after the Izzedine al-Qassem Brigades, Hamas's military wing, warned Fatah security personnel to abandon their posts. "Stay at home and you will be safe," a broadcast statement said. The warning came after gunmen opened fire on the home of Ismail Haniya, Hamas prime minister.
A spokesman for Fatah, which is headed by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority (PA) president, said the party's central committee would meet to decide whether to remain in a unity government formed in March with Hamas.
Fatah entered government following an agreement reached in Mecca that aimed to end a previous cycle of factional violence.
Hamas forces concentrated their assaults on targets associated with the presidential guard, national security and preventive security forces. They are all nominally official PA institutions, but in reality are allied to Fatah.
Hamas militias are made up of the military wing, which does not take direct orders from Hamas government ministers, and the Hamas-dominated executive force, a security unit formed after the Islamists came to power in elections 17 months ago.
The Fatah-allied forces have received training and support and - or so Hamas alleges - weapons from the US and elsewhere, leading the Islamists to allege they are the target of a US-Israeli plot. US officials insist there have been no transfers of arms.
As Hamas fighters took up positions near the Gaza City headquarters of the preventive security force, a statement read over a loudspeaker at a nearby mosque declared: "The warning which we have given you to surrender has ended, and we will attack this position of Zionist collaborators." The latest escalation has been particularly brutal, reflecting long-standing clan feuds that have been sharpened by earlier rounds of fighting.
Victims have been dragged from their homes and shot, or thrown from high buildings, a method reminiscent of the worst days of the civil war in the 1970s.
Residents said they feared worse violence in the days ahead but believed the conflict would fall short of all-out civil war.
Hamas appeared to be concentrating its fire on targets associated with its main enemies in Fatah rather than trying to wipe out a rival movement that is itself riven by factionalism.
Announcing it was in full control of security headquarters in the southern town of Khan Younis, Hamas said scores of security men who surrendered their weapons were allowed to go home. Meanwhile, it warned Fatah-aligned units in north Gaza not to travel to Gaza City to intervene in the fighting there.
The West Bank, dominated by Fatah, has been relatively calm.
However, the presidential guard yesterday stormed a Hamas television station in Ramallah and detained three staff, while Hamas said one of its deputy ministers was kidnapped in the territory. - (Financial Times service)