Palestinian tensions simmer after West Bank killings

The Islamist Hamas movement yesterday protested the killing of its militants by Palestinian police in the West Bank as its own Gaza-based security forces launched a new campaign of arrests.

Around 2,000 women Hamas supporters protested against Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas after nine people were killed in violent clashes between his police and Hamas militants in the Israeli-occupied West Bank last week.

"No to Abbas, No to Fayyad," the women in Gaza City chanted, referring to his Western-backed prime minister Salam Fayyad, who has launched a security crackdown across the territory over the past several months.

The women waved green Hamas flags and held signs reading 'Abbas's security forces are the bodyguards of the Zionists' and 'No dialogue with arrests in the West Bank'.

Two Hamas members and a Palestinian policeman were killed in a shootout last Thursday in the West Bank town of Qalqilya, and six people were killed in a similar gunbattle there earlier in the week.

An investigation by the Al-Haq human rights organisation published last Thursday said Hamas militants opened fire first on both occasions.

But senior Hamas leader Ahmed Bahar accused Abbas and Fayyad of treason for allegedly cooperating with Israel against the Islamist movement.

"You can either return to the Palestinian people and the dialogue in Cairo or you can continue your treachery in the embrace of the (Israeli) occupation," he told the crowd of protesters.

"But this occupation will never do anything for you. They will toss you aside as they have tossed aside others in the past."

Meanwhile, officials in Abbas's Fatah party in Gaza and the West Bank accused Hamas-run security forces of detaining scores of its members in a campaign of arrests launched overnight.

"In Gaza the arrests and abductions against us continue," said Fahmi al-Zaarir, a Fatah spokesman in the West Bank. "There are more than several dozen people wanted by Hamas and they began arresting them last night."

The Hamas-run interior ministry in Gaza said it was targeting "criminal and outlaw groups" accused of collecting information on its leaders and militant hideouts to sell to Abbas's Palestinian Authority and Israel.

The bitter divide between the two groups climaxed in June 2007 when Hamas gunmen drove Abbas's forces from the Gaza Strip in a week of deadly street battles that cleaved Palestinians into hostile rival entities.