Hamas was poised to seize full control of the Gaza Strip on Thursday, overrunning key security strongholds of the rival Fatah movement after days of ferocious gun battles in the chaotic territory.
The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) called on president Mahmoud Abbas to sack the teetering coalition government and declare a state of emergency after the deaths of almost 100 people in less than a week.
Hamas gunmen stormed the compound of the preventive security forces in Gaza City and hoisted the green flag of the Islamist movement on the roof after an hours-long battle that left at least 14 dead and 70 wounded, witnesses said.
Dozens of Fatah fighters loyal to Abbas, some of them stripped to their underwear, were dragged out of the building with their hands in the air as black-clad masked Hamas gunmen stood watch, they said.
Some Islamist fighters prayed on the sidewalk while on the rooftop others fired automatic weapons into the air to celebrate their latest victory in what one Hamas leader described as ”a battle between Islam and heresy”.
It is largest stronghold of pro-Fatah security services to fall to Hamas — considered a terror outfit by the European Union, Israel and the United States — whose disciplined fighters had already overrun positions in the south and the north.
Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, demanded the surrender of the overall Fatah-controlled Palestinian security headquarters as its militiamen besieged the complex in Gaza City.
Hamas’s armed wing also declared it had grabbed a security compound in the southern city of Rafah on the border with Egypt and the Fatah intelligence headquarters for the entire Gaza in the northern town of Beit Lahiya.
”What is happening in Gaza is the second liberation of the Gaza Strip from the band of [Israeli] collaborators after the first liberation from the bands of settlers” in 2005, Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri told Agence France-Presse.
As Gaza gradually fell to the movement headed by exiled Khaled Meshaal in Damascus, the PLO executive committee urged that Abbas sack the three-month-old Cabinet and declare a state of emergency in Gaza and the West Bank.
It also urged him to call for international protection to declare Hamas’s armed wing and paramilitary force outlaws and to organise early elections.
Abbas, who has warned of collapse and civil war if the Gaza ”madness” continued, will ”make his decision known in the coming hours”, his aide Nabil Amr, told reporters in Ramallah.
Adding to the bloodshed, three children were among four Palestinians killed by an Israeli tank shell fired at Rafah, medics said.
‘Total chaos’
An increasingly alarmed international community warned that the no-holds-barred power struggle between Hamas and the secular Fatah endangered prospects of a future Palestinian state and peace with Israel.
At least 98 people have died in the increasingly vicious gun battles that flared a week ago between the rivals, which are separated by ideology and have been at loggerheads for years.
For a second day in a row, the power struggle spilled over into the occupied West Bank, a Fatah stronghold, with the offices of a Hamas lawmaker in Nablus torched a day after a gun battle in the city that left several people wounded.
In Ramallah, the offices of a Hamas association were also set aflame, as was a car belonging to a Hamas religious leader in Bethlehem.
Pro-Fatah security services arrested several dozen Hamas leaders and politicians in the towns of Ramallah, Jericho and Nablus, security sources and Hamas said.
Human Rights Watch has accused both sides of committing war crimes during the fighting, which has turned hospitals into battlegrounds, seen ambulances prevented from reaching wounded and peace demonstrators shot dead.
The violence has forced the United Nations’s main Palestinian refugee agency to suspend all but essential activities and the EU to halt its relief projects in the territory where the majority of people receive aid.
The battles have been fanned by inflammatory rhetoric, with both sides accusing each other of being foreign agents — Hamas says Fatah is in the service of Israel, while Fatah say the Islamists are working for Iran.
The international community is increasingly alarmed at the bloodshed, which has continued despite several ceasefire attempts and a February agreement brokered by Saudi Arabia which paved the way for the unity government.
The Cairo-based Arab League is due to hold an emergency meeting on the crisis on Friday.
The US, Israel’s main ally, warned that the infighting endangered the prospects for a Palestinian state, while Russia said further escalation risked ”leading to total chaos … and the spread of conflict in the region”.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon held preliminary talks on the idea of sending an international force to Gaza, but Hamas rejected the move, saying it would treat foreign troops as occupation forces.
The Organisation of the Islamic Conference also rejected the idea.
Israel — which pulled its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005 — has watched with increasing alarm, but said it would not intervene.
Tensions have been boiling in Gaza ever since Hamas routed long-dominant Fatah in January 2006 parliamentary polls, much of them fanned by disagreement over who should control the security services.
They exploded into major bouts of infighting in mid-December, killing more than 250 people since then in Gaza, one of the most densely populated areas on the planet. — Sapa-AFP