A British woman and her parents were kidnapped by a group of unidentified gunmen today in the southern Gaza Strip.

Kate Burton, 25, who worked for Al-Mezan Centre for Human Rights in Gaza City, was bundled into a white Mercedes car with her mother and father this afternoon only a few hundred yards from the Rafah border with Egypt.

A spokesman for the centre, Nafiz al-Madour, confirmed to BBC News 24 tonight that Ms Burton, who had worked as a public co-ordinator for Al-Mezan, had been abducted while on holiday.

"She has been working with us for three months. We are trying to call the policemen and the protective security and our staff and volunteers are looking for her.

"We don't know how it happened. There is some information that they might find her tonight and release her."

The Foreign Office confirmed that there had been a kidnapping. A spokesman said: "We are in a position to confirm reports of three Britons missing in the Occupied Territories. At this stage we have no further details."

The kidnappers are believed to belong to a group known as the Black Panthers, an armed offshoot of the Fatah political movement, said a spokesman at the British consulate in East Jerusalem.

The three are the latest in a line of foreigners to be kidnapped in the Gaza Strip, usually for ransom. Most have been swiftly set free. Last Wednesday, the Dutch principal of the prestigious American School and his Australian deputy were kidnapped in the northern Gaza Strip but released within hours.

The Palestinian police commander in Rafah told the BBC that the Britons were kidnapped around 4pm (2pm GMT). He said that the three were travelling in a car 200 yards away from the border when they were approached by gunmen in another vehicle.

Ian MacKinnon, Times Jerusalem Correspondent, said that the captives were unlikely to have crossed into Gaza from Egypt, as the border is closed to all but those with Palestinian passports. "This demonstrates the complete lawlessness of the place," he said.

"There have been a whole spate of similar kidnappings over the last few months, always by some renegade gunmen. A number of journalists have been among those kidnapped. With one exception they have all been released within a few hours.

"It is usually related to some local dispute - someone trying to get their relatives out of prison, and so on."

The United Nations withdrew all its non-essential foreign staff earlier in the summer after a number of its employees were abducted, although all were subsequently released unharmed.

The latest kidnapping added to the disorder which is undermining attempts by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, to assert his control in the coastal strip following Israel’s withdrawal this summer.

Mr Abbas’s critics have accused him of giving in to kidnappers’ demands, encouraging more abductions.

Today gunmen besieged electoral offices in Rafah and elsewhere in Gaza, hours before Mr Abbas's ruling Fatah party finally managed to submit its list of candidates for next month’s Palestinian parliamentary election.

In the most violent incident, dozens of masked gunmen from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a radical Fatah offshoot, had a gun battle with police at an electoral office in Gaza City. At least one officer was wounded.

Al-Aqsa activists also occupied electoral offices in the southern town of Khan Younis and Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, and surrounded another in Rafah. Gunmen told reporters that they wanted the Fatah candidate list to be reopened so that they could be represented. Electoral offices were later declared open after the gunmen ended their siege.

The Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority has proved largely incapable of clamping down on pervasive insecurity in the territories. Mr Abbas said that he had ordered the security services to act "with force" against those responsible for attacks on electoral offices. But his effectiveness is being undermined by internal dissent within Fatah.

The Fatah candidate list submitted today, headed by the jailed intifada leader, Marwan Barghouti, marked Fatah’s bid to overcome deep divisions that saw the faction initially register two rival lists for the January 25 polls.

Only after lengthy talks did the two strands of the party agree to merge their line-ups, fearful that they would otherwise see their decade-long grip of power slip away at the expense of Hamas, the Islamic militant group which is contesting its first parliamentary poll.

Most of the Fatah candidates are from a younger generation, seen as more likely to win votes than representatives of an old guard that is tainted by corruption, and that came to prominence under Yassir Arafat, the late Palestinian leader.

Blamed for years of corruption within the Palestinian Authority, Fatah has been weakened by a credible threat from Hamas, which swept to victory in municipal elections in Gaza and West Bank earlier this year.

As well as its armed wing - which was responsible for the majority of attacks on Israel during the five-year intifada - Hamas has an efficient political wing, and pays for social welfare projects in areas rife with unemployment.

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