Hamas yesterday accused Fatah of trying to assassinate Ismail Haniya, the Palestinian Prime Minister, as the two warring factions exchanged gunfire on the streets.

More than 30 supporters of the Islamist party were injured when the Fatah-dominated official security forces fired at them and clubbed them in central Ramallah, spreading the violence from Gaza to Fatah’s West Bank stronghold. Witnesses said that the Palestinian Authority police stopped Hamas marching from a mosque into the city centre and shot into the crowd when they hurled stones and bottles.

It is the worst violence between the two factions for years and follows a series of killings amid the breakdown of talks to form a national unity government. Hamas accused Muhammed Dahlan, a senior security adviser to President Mahmoud Abbas, of orchestrating the attack in which one of Mr Haniya’s bodyguards was killed on Thursday night at the isolated Rafah border crossing from Gaza into Egypt.

Without offering any evidence Ismail Radwan, a Hamas spokesman, condemned what he termed a cowardly assassination attempt “at the hands of a group who have a grudge in their hearts, led by Muhammed Dahlan.” Mr Dahlan, a former Gaza security chief and government minister, has a history of enmity with the Islamist group, which hurls accusations at him almost daily.

Mr Dahlan rejected the allegations as baseless, accusing the Islamist movement’s leaders of trying “to mask their failure to manage Palestinian political and social life”. The verbal salvoes were matched by battles on the streets as Hamas staged rallies to celebrate its 19th anniversary.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, has spent months pushing for a national unity government, hoping that a coalition would win international recognition denied to Hamas despite its victory in January’s elections and end sanctions that have crippled the Palestinian economy.

Mr Abbas is scheduled to give a speech today amid speculation that he may threaten to dismiss the Hamas-led Government and call for new elections.

In an effort to upstage Mr Abbas, Hamas crammed more than 10,000 green-sashed supporters into a Gaza stadium for a rally, with Mr Haniya as the star speaker. Moving inside a black phalanx of Hamas bodyguards the silver-bearded Prime Minister claimed to have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from a tour of the Muslim world. It was his attempt to carry $35 million (£18 million) through the Rafah crossing that sparked the events leading up to Thursday’s shooting.

Brushing off his narrow escape he shouted: “We joined this movement to become martyrs, not ministers. You can’t scare us. Either we are going to get victory or death.”

Whipping the segregated crowd into a fervour of hero worship over Mr Haniya’s near-martyrdom, warm-up speakers alternated between deploring civil war, and antagonism towards Fatah.

“Fatah you are at a crossroads, either choose resistance and decency or you become the tool of destruction in the hands of those [foreigners] who turned on Yassir Arafat and the PLO,” said one announcer.

• $700m amount Ismail Haniya claimed to have raised to aid the Palestinians

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