The message crackled over the walkie-talkie as Hamas gunmen stormed yet another Fatah security compound in northern Gaza. “We are running up the stairs to place the green flag on the roof.” Half an hour’s drive south, a poster of Yassir Arafat, the Fatah founder and icon for his nationalist followers, lay scrunched up in a bin as his secular legacy was swept away by a new generation of religious fighters.

Throughout the day frantic shouts over the airwaves mingled with gunfire, warnings, orders and threats. As exuberant Islamist gunmen turned their attention to new targets, each last bastion of the old regime collapsed like dominoes to the Hamas onslaught.

The radio chatter cautioned of the threat of prowling Israeli gunships monitoring the battle from off the coast — and broadcast rumours of Fatah fighters trying to flee in ambulances and by boat.

A stark order penetrated the traffic. “Anyone who pokes his head outside a window let him have it, not with a gun but with a Rocket-Propelled Grenade,” a Hamas fighter commanded during the taking of a security base known as “the ship” because of its nautical design. “If any civilians try to get into the security building, open fire.”

Blockade drains life from Gaza

The movement of goods into Gaza had been intermittent at best since Hamas won Palestinian elections early last year

BACKGROUND

• Israel continues Gaza blitz as 310 dead

• Q&A: Hamas and Gaza

• 97 days and counting for BBC's man in Gaza

• Now war is with the enemy within

• The little girl trapped by a quirk of war

Related Links

• Hamas to celebrate victory at Friday prayers

• Analysis: the future is bleak for Abbas

Over the airwaves came the crackled reply: “We have been shooting at the National Security guys all day, but we are not going to shoot at civilians.”

In scenes reminiscent of the fall of Baghdad four years ago, hundreds of Palestinians swarmed into the wrecked “ship” in northern Gaza City and stripped it of all its contents, loading cars and donkey carts with anything they could lay their hands on — chairs, tables, even small pot plants.

Hamas fighters were too busy carting off confiscated security files and celebrating their victory by firing in the air to try effectively to stop them. Thick clouds of black smoke billowed from burning buses at a nearby depot.

A Hamas gunman ran past firing in the air with his AK47 assault rifle. “Samih Madhun is dead!” he yelled triumphantly, to which the entire street erupted into shooting in the air to celebrate the reported demise of one of the top commanders of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the Fatah militia group.

A Hamas TV station later broadcast footage of Madhun’s last moments, showing him being marched through the streets by Hamas militants as a mob spat at him and kicked him. The gunmen then pushed him into the middle of the throng and shot him, with armed members of the crowd apparently joining in. Viewers spat at their television screens showing the execution footage.

The gunman who brought news of Madhun’s killing turned to a reporter to add that Muhammad Dahlan, the once-impressive head of Fatah’s security forces in Gaza, was also to be killed if he showed his face.

With Hamas in control of two more Fatah strongholds yesterday, Hamas special forces men said that they had lists of Fatah members whom they accused of collaborating with Israel, and who were marked for punishment. “We know who the traitors are and we have a list of them. We will deal with them in due course,” said Abu Jihad, his face covered with a mask.

The price for collaboration in the Palestinian territories is almost always death, and the announcement of such a list lent weight to reports of summary execution of some Fatah fighters. But Abu Jihad said that such a fate was reserved only for senior commanders, while rank-and-file Fatah members would be spared.

“Ordinary Fatah fighers are our brothers and we invite them to join us,” he said, adding that two of his friends, who worked for the Fatah-dominated National Security forces, had come to him the day before, handed over their weapons and asked to join the Qassam brigades.

Other Hamas fighters, who yesterday took final control of the southern border town of Rafah, a Fatah stronghold, complained that some fleeing Fatah men had rigged their abandoned bases to explode as the Islamists moved in.

“Before they fled, in their cowardly way, they tried to kill us with these booby traps,” said a masked Hamas gunman in the Bureij refugee camp, holding up four rolls of flex cords leading to what he said was a stash of defused explosives.

On the road between Rafah and Gaza City, only Hamas fighters were in evidence. South of the Bureij camp, Hamas special forces paraded in front of one of several security compounds that they had captured the night before.

“Actually it was hardly a battle,” sneered one of the gunmen. “They just fled.” He said he believed victory throughout the Gaza Strip would be completed before midday prayers on Friday. “It will be the sweetest moment in my life when tomorrow I will pray in the presidential compound,” he said.

As night fell, the last two Fatah radio stations faded from the air, one reportedly destroyed by a Hamas bomb, leaving the lonely defenders of the presidential compound to face a final Hamas onslaught alone.

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