Gaza parliamentary official says detained by Hamas

GAZA, July 10 (Reuters) A top official with the Palestinian parliament in the Gaza Strip said today that he was detained by Hamas gunmen and questioned for hours about why he went to work on a day that Hamas had decreed a day off.

Izz el-Deen al-Sharif, director general of the parliament office in Gaza, said gunmen who identified themselves as members of Hamas's Executive Force roused him from bed on Tuesday morning and took him to an interrogation facility where he was questioned for three hours.

He said the gunmen suggested he was encouraging his fellow government workers to follow President Mahmoud Abbas's decrees instead of Hamas's. Sharif is a supporter of Abbas's secular Fatah faction.

Sharif said at issue were Abbas's new guidelines for the working week. Abbas's emergency government in the occupied West Bank set Sunday to Thursday as working days with a Friday/Saturday weekend.

But the Hamas-led government, which Abbas dismissed after the Islamist movement seized Gaza by force last month, has set a Saturday-Wednesday working week.

Hamas has rejected Abbas's dismissal of the unity government they formed last March, describing the establishment of an emergency cabinet as a coup.

''They asked questions about our work (schedule) and the fact that we take Friday and Saturday off and not Thursday and Friday,'' Sharif told Reuters. ''Their questions sounded as if they accused me of inciting employees to obey the orders of the emergency government.'' ''They also said I was inciting against Hamas ... and the Executive Force and requested an apology, and I said, 'I could not apologise for something I did not do,''' he said.

Some Fatah officials and human rights groups have accused the Executive Force of secretly holding Fatah prisoners in the Gaza Strip. Hamas has denied this along with accounts by some Fatah security men that they had been tortured by Hamas fighters who came to detain and disarm them.

Security forces loyal to Abbas have detained, in some cases only briefly, at least 299 Hamas supporters in the West Bank since the Islamist group seized control of Gaza, according to Hamas officials.

Fatah-dominated security sources have confirmed dozens of arrests in the West Bank. Senior Abbas aides have dismissed suggestions detainees may have been harmed.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which is based in Gaza, accused Abbas on Tuesday of issuing orders that ''lay the foundations for a military dictatorship''.

Reuters RKM VP0012