A POLICEMAN was shot dead outside a mosque yesterday and a security chief died after an explosion in the latest infighting between the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and Fatah, its secular rival.

Salem Khudeih, a member of the new paramilitary police force of Hamas, was the ninth person killed this month during an increasingly violent power struggle that threatens to tip over into civil war.

Nabil Hodhod, 35, a security services commander in Gaza died in his car. All the circumstance of his death point suspicions towards Hamas and its allies.

A gun battle broke out in Shifa hospital when Mr Hodhod’s body was taken there, with gunmen on hospital balconies firing at others outside.

Palestinian leaders, headed by President Abbas, are scheduled to meet today in an attempt to keep the situation from worsening. “Civil war is a term that does not exist in the Palestinian dictionary. I assure the people that these incidents can be overcome,” Ismail Haniya, the Prime Minister of the Hamas-led Government, said before the “national dialogue” involving Hamas, Fatah and other factions.

Mr Khudeih and two of his cousins were seized outside a mosque in Khan Younis, in the Gaza Strip, by masked gunmen. Relatives said that the cousins were critically injured, being beaten with metal staves and shot in the leg.

Mr Khudeih was a member of the new, black-uniformed, 3,000-strong paramilitary “support unit” created by Said Siyam, a Hamas man and the Interior Minister of the Palestinian Authority. The force has been deployed on the streets in defiance of President Abbas.

Its supporters — paradoxically including thousands from Fatah splinter groups — paraded through Gaza in a show of strength hours after the killing of Mr Khudeih. At the Unity Street crossroads sandbags have been put in place to protect the new police force.

Hamas blamed publicly Mr Khudeih’s killing on the Preventive Security Services (PSS), the Fatah-dominated force that is one of several security fiefdoms within Mr Abbas’s fragmented Palestinian Authority. Run by Rashid Abu Shbak, a Fatah strongman, it has long been associated with Mohammed Dahlan, a powerful former Interior Minister. Mohammed Khudeih, another cousin of the dead man, said: “It is politics. We have a problem in our area between Hamas and the PSS. There have been many problems in the past few weeks.”

Gaza is the focus of the strife. The stronghold of Hamas, it is almost entirely sealed off from the outside world by Israeli soldiers and gunboats, and its economy has gone into free fall since the West cut off international aid to the Palestinian Authority two months ago.

Israeli vessels have intercepted weapons shipments and Palestinian intelligence officials acknowledge that huge quantities are being sneaked in through tunnels and by Beduin smuggling rings as both sides arm themselves. Ordinary Palestinians are bearing the brunt of the conflict. Each side blames the other and all accuse the usual suspects — Israeli and American “collaborators”.

Not only gunmen are victims. Bilal Herzala, 15, was among ten schoolchildren injured after a gun fight between Hamas and al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a Fatah offshoot, outside his school a fortnight ago.

“I blame both parties,” Atef, the teenager’s father, said. “They fight between each other over power and children get caught in the middle. Everybody should go with the new Government because it was elected. The old Government was tried for 12 years, and what did we get? Nothing.”

Members of the younger generation of Fatah are bitter that they were squeezed out of real power by their corrupt elders during the Arafat era.

Salah al-Bardawi, a spokesman for the Government, told The Times that the new police unit was responding to people’s demands for law and order. “Abu Mazen (Abbas) is a weak person and many of the Palestinian Authority security leaders are deliberately not doing their job and deploying their security forces because they want chaos,” he said. “They want the Government to look helpless so they can get the ball back and return to the old regime.”

However, Hamas is no more willing to risk confronting tens of thousands of well-armed Fatah security forces than Mr Abbas is to risk a showdown with the smaller but well-disciplined Islamists.

“We cannot sack these leaders,” Mr al-Bardawi said bitterly, “because, I am sorry to say, they are taking cover behind their political organisations. We can’t punish them without provoking more problems.”

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