INTERNECINE strife in Gaza claimed its most senior victim yesterday when militants assassinated one of the most hated security chiefs there in a brazen challenge to Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority.

Witnesses told how a convoy of about twenty four-wheel-drive vehicles packed with masked gunmen arrived outside Moussa Arafat’s home in Gaza City before dawn. They fought a 45-minute battle with his guards before leaving him dead in the street and kidnapping his son.

Few mourned the passing of the 65-year-old cousin of Yassir Arafat, who had a plethora of enemies within all factions, not least his own ruling Fatah. Within hours the murder was claimed by the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), a splinter group of mainly disaffected Palestinian Authority security officials widely blamed for the bombing of a US convoy that killed three Americans in 2003. Openly defying the police, conspicuous by their absence until long after the gunmen fled, the PRC accused Mr Arafat of corruption and collaborating with Israel while, bizarrely, claiming that his murder would further a stable Palestinian state.

But even senior officials acknowledged that it boded ill for unity as the authority’s fractured security forces prepare to secure the evacuated Israeli Jewish settlements. This could happen by Monday amid reports that Ariel Sharon could accelerate the handover date. Israeli forces shot dead one Palestinian amid a throng who tried to charge into an empty settlement on Tuesday.

President Abbas condemned the killing of Mr Arafat, whom he had relegated from security chief to military adviser this year. He promised that his security forces would do everything to bring the killers to justice. One off-duty guard said that his employer had been attacked often before, “but that was just in-fighting with the Preventive Security Service who shot in the air and left. This was different. They came from everywhere and there was a heavy barrage of fire from all directions.”

Mohammed Shamala, 20, said that he saw two dozen gunmen leave the house just before 5am, one carrying Mr Arafat’s body while two others led his son Malhan away. “I heard a woman crying and screaming ‘They have killed Moussa Arafat and taken away my son’,” he said. “The police didn’t arrive until 7am.” Moussa Arafat was found in the street near by with, hospital officials said, one fatal bullet wound to the head and fourteen to the body.

Ahmed Qureia, the Prime Minister, conceded: “This act will serve as an obstacle to bettering the situation of the Palestinians.”

Amr Karmout, a spokesman for the PRC, told The Times: “We killed him because he was corrupt. He had a decisive role in collaborating with the Israelis. We hope that the Palestinian police will not try to arrest those who did this because we believe our act was in the interests of Palestinian society.”

Although the identity of the culprits seemed clear, many Palestinians suspect that the shadowy PRC may have been put up to it by one of Mr Arafat’s powerful enemies within the regime. Some predict revenge killings, but others say that he was too unpopular and associated with a bygone era.

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