Six killed in factional gun battles in Gaza

Gaza, June 10: Masked gunmen from rival Palestinian factions streamed onto the streets to fight their most intense battles in weeks today in the Gaza Strip, with the weekend toll rising to six dead and 59 wounded.

Among the victims was a pro-Hamas Islamic cleric pulled from his home and shot several times in the street after a guard from the rival Fatah movement was shot and thrown to his death from a high building in Gaza City, officials said.

Witnesses said masked gunmen from both Islamist Hamas and secular Fatah set up roadblocks and barriers to stop cars and check identification papers, and abducted rival supporters from vehicles and houses.

Main roads were paralysed by the fighting. Shops and businesses closed early.

The latest round of fighting, the worst since an Egyptian-brokered truce was declared in mid-May, began last night in the town of Rafah, where hundreds of rival gunmen took up positions on street corners and rooftops.

Hamas and Fatah pounded each other with rocket-propelled grenades and machineguns in Rafah, said witnesses who took shelter indoors as the rivals fought block by block.

Three men from Fatah and two from Hamas were killed in all, including the cleric of a main mosque in Gaza City, and a member of President Mahmoud Abbas's elite Force 17, hospital officials said.

A sixth man was brought to a Gaza City hospital tonight with his hands and legs tied and a gunshot wound to the head, the officials said. Relatives identified this victim to Reuters as a relative of a senior Hamas executive force officer.

The officials said yet another Hamas man died of wounds from a shooting last week, while a total of 59 people were wounded in today's fighting.

Hamas accused Fatah of executing the cleric, a shooting that followed the killing of the guard, which Fatah blamed on Hamas.

''TV'' SIGN

As the factional violence spread, Israeli aircraft bombed a Gaza building used by Islamic Jihad, wounding two people, after gunmen from the group infiltrated into Israel at a key border crossing on Saturday using an armoured vehicle marked ''TV''.

Israeli soldiers killed one of the gunmen who infiltrated, and several others fled back into Gaza.

In a statement, the Palestinian journalists' union criticised militants for placing a ''TV'' insignia on the vehicle they used to approach Gaza's border with Israel.

Militants' use of media markings, the union said, could turn journalists who use armoured vehicles in the Gaza Strip into targets for Israeli attack.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said militants had tried to ''take advantage of the special sensitivity that we have in a democratic country, such as ours, to the right of the media to operate freely and independently in security-sensitive areas''.

Tension has remained high in Gaza since the killings of 50 Palestinians in internal fighting last month, followed by a surge in Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel and Israeli air strikes on militants.

Hamas said the fighting started last night when Fatah gunmen shot dead a local Hamas commander in Rafah. Fatah said the fighting began when Hamas used rocket-propelled grenades and explosives to destroy the homes of two Fatah militants.

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 electoral victory, a leading Palestinian rights group said in a report on Wednesday.

Reuters>