Video: latest fighting in Gaza

Triumphant Hamas fighters are planning to celebrate their final Gaza victory with Friday prayers today in the captured administrative compound of the routed secular President.The pledge came from a leading preacher as the Islamist forces overran the last Fatah strongholds.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President and Fatah leader, declared a state of emergency last night and dissolved the Hamas-led Government. He said that he would call new elections “as soon as the situation allows”.

The President cut an increasingly weak figure, however, and such orders appeared simply to acknowledge the realities of the unfolding chaos. Ismail Haniya, the Prime Minister, shrugged off his dismissal, insisting that his Government remained in place.

Blockade drains life from Gaza

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

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BACKGROUND

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His defiance was echoed by senior Hamas figures. “There will be no dialogue with Fatah, only the sword and the rifle,” declared Nezar Rayyan, a top Hamas leader, on the Islamist movement’s radio station as Fatah broadcasters were bombed off the air.

“God willing, I will deliver the next Friday prayers sermon in the Muntada (presidential compound) and we will transform the al-Saraya security compound into a big mosque.” Within hours of that pledge, both compounds were in Hamas’s hands.

Fatah leaders, fearing the fighting was about to spread to the West Bank, ordered their militias there to start arresting Hamas members, although some rank-and-file Fatah gunmen said that they would go even further and kill their rivals if they caught them.

Hamas activists were being detained across the West Bank, in the towns of Jenin, Nablus, Jericho, Ramallah and Bethlehem, even as the green flags of Hamas appeared on more captured Fatah security compounds in Gaza City after heavy fighting.

Mr Abbas has found his leadership skills called into question during the crisis, with Fatah fighters complaining that they had received no directions from the top.

After five days of fighting, Mr Abbas finally ordered his men in Gaza to fight back yesterday, but too late. More than 110 people have been killed this week, including four children who were blown up while playing with an unexploded bomb in the southern Gaza town of Rafah.

The heaviest fighting focused on the Fatah-run preventive security compound — once a British Mandate fortification inherited from the Ottoman Empire, and known as the al-Saraya building — and the military intelligence base in Gaza City.

Both were pounded by mortar, rocket and machinegun fire before surrendering to the withering onslaught.

“What happened today in the preventive security headquarters was the second liberation of the Gaza Strip,” Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas official, said. “This time it was liberated from the herds of the collaborators” with Israel, he said, referring to the common Hamas charge that Fatah has fatally compromised itself by seeking peace with the Jewish state, something the Islamists refuse to do.

“Last time, it was liberated from the herds of the settlers” during the Israeli pullout of 2005.

Hamas called for Fatah fighters to surrender, assuring them that they would not be harmed as long as they had not “collaborated” with Israel.

“We are very close to you, closer than you know. Put down your arms and come out,” Hamas radio stations said.About 100 Fatah fighters fled to Egypt yesterday.

There was growing concern both in Israel and the US at the level of violence and the prospect of a new Islamist state wedged under Israel’s southern border.

“It has to be defined as a hostile and dangerous entity and be treated as such, because it is,” said Amos Gilad, a senior Israeli defence official.

Washington also expressed its concern at the prospect of an outright Hamas victory. “It’s obviously a source of profound concern,” Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said.

Israel sealed the border it controls all around Gaza, wary that the firing would wash up on its doorstep. The Fatah police commander at the Erez crossing point on the northern border yesterday sent his men home without uniforms or weapons, after their relief shift simply failed to materialise.

On the Israeli side a border guard confirmed that his Fatah counterparts were still nominally in control of the Palestinian section of the border.

Asked what would happen if Hamas showed up on the other side, he shrugged and said: “I don’t know, maybe there will be war.”

In the nearby Israeli town of Sderot, which has borne the brunt of Hamas missile attacks in recent months, the prospect of the Islamist movement forming a state so close was met with grim resignation.

“That means things will be very difficult for us, it will get worse,” said Shula Almog, a librarian in Sderot.

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