New Gaza truce called as gunmen continue fighting

GAZA, June 11 (Reuters) Palestinian factions reached a new Egyptian-mediated truce deal today in the Gaza Strip in a bid to halt a cycle of bloodletting in which six were killed and dozens wounded since Saturday, Palestinian officials said.

The ceasefire formally took effect at local time (1630 IST) and made a patchy start, as members of President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction and the Islamist Hamas movement continued trading sporadic gunfire in the streets.

One gunbattle erupted after militants fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a main police station in Gaza, police said. There were no immediate reports of injuries.

Gunmen from both camps also continued to block key Gaza intersections with checkpoints despite the terms of the deal calling for the militants to be pulled off the streets.

The latest fighting has been the worst since a ceasefire declared a month ago after a wave of violence killed more than 50 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them fighters.

A key motive behind the new truce was to permit 70,000 high school students in Gaza and the occupied West Bank to take their matriculation exams peacefully.

''These clashes were regrettable and harmful,'' Abbas said at a high school in the West Bank town of Ramallah where the exams were getting under way. He said both Fatah and Hamas were still working ''to put an end to these phenomena''.

The tests began on schedule in Gaza, but most pupils took circuitous routes to their schools in a bid to avoid the gunmen as the sounds of shooting punctuated the air, witnesses said.

Musbah Abu al-Kheir, 17, passed several armed checkpoints on his way to school from a refugee camp outside Gaza City.

GUNFIRE AND SIRENS ''Fatah and Hamas have no appreciation for the fact we are having final exams today,'' he said.

''How are we supposed to take exams to the sounds of gunfire and ambulance sirens?'' Among the victims of yesterday's intensive gun battles that spread along the coastal enclave from the southern town of Rafah to Gaza City, was a pro-Hamas Islamic cleric pulled from his home and shot several times in the street.

The shooting of the cleric came after a guard from Fatah was shot and thrown to his death from a high building in Gaza City, officials said.

Of the six killed since Saturday, three men were from Fatah, two from Hamas and another man, executed with a bullet to the head while his hands and legs were tied, was identified by relatives to Reuters as being related to a senior officer in Hamas's Executive Force.

Tension has remained high in Gaza since last month.

The once-dominant Fatah formed a unity government in March with Hamas to try to end faction fighting and ease international sanctions imposed after Hamas rose to power a year earlier.

An estimated 616 Palestinians have been killed in factional fighting since Hamas's 2006 election victory, a leading Palestinian rights group said in a report last week.

REUTERS KK BD1507