GAZA: Three killed in violence between Hamas and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's suppoorters in Gaza

Gunbattles raged between Hamas loyalists and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah forces in Gaza City on Tuesday (December 18), killing at least three people and reviving fears the Gaza Strip could slip into civil war. Internal Palestinian fighting, the worst in a decade, has escalated since Abbas called for early elections on Saturday in an attempt to break a political deadlock with the Hamas government. Hamas has accused Abbas of launching a "coup". Clashes erupted outside a key security agency controlled by Abbas. A Palestinian security source said the fight broke out when Hamas gunmen fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the compound of the General Intelligence agency. Witnesses and rival factions said a Hamas policeman was killed in the gun fight at the entrance and inside the compound of the main Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Rocket-propelled grenades were also fired in that incident. The gunbattle began when Hamas police tried to detain security men from Abbas's Fatah faction on suspicion they had been involved in earlier clashes. Hospital officials said the bodies of two security men loyal to Abbas's Fatah had been dumped in a street. Fatah sources said the men were abducted hours earlier by a Hamas-led police unit and "executed". A Hamas police spokesman denied the force had abducted or killed anyone. Five children were also wounded after getting caught in cross-fire. Around a dozen people have been wounded in total. Both Hamas and Fatah blamed each other for the sudden surge in street fighting in central Gaza City, where gunmen fought running battles with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. "Yesterday evening there was also a meeting scheduled between us and Hamas and in the presence of the factions and Hamas did not show up for this meeting and there was an escalation in the north and this dawn the kidnapping and firing and armed deployment using RPGs (Rocket-Propelled Grenades) happened this morning at Al Shifa hospital when they detained a group of secret service personnel," a Fatah spokesman Tawfiq Abu Khousa told Reuters. "The battle is not with Fatah specifically, the battle is with isolated people who serve the interest of the occupation and wanted to ruin the agreement (ceasefire). As long as Fatah does not denounce the membership of these groups and does not lift the factional immunity and since the President has not sent a decree to those groups and pulled them off the streets, as long as the national and Islamic power does not taken a strong stand against those traitors and collaborators Hamas wants to take a strong stand in teaching those people a lesson and to relieve the Palestinian people from their corruption," Fawzi Burhom, a Hamas spokesman explained. Hamas and Fatah tried for months to form a unity government to end a power struggle after Hamas beat Fatah in January elections. The clashes have effectively buried a truce in fighting agreed on Sunday night. Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, a senior Hamas leader, is expected to make a speech in Gaza at 6 p.m. (1600 GMT) to respond to Abbas's election call. Hamas has said it would boycott any polls.

ITN Source | December 20, 2006

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