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GAZA - Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader dismissed as prime minister by the Palestinian president, said today his government would continue to function and he urged an end to reprisal killings by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
"The existing government will carry out its tasks in the best
possible way," Haniyeh said in a broadcast in the early hours after Hamas forces routed presidential supporters in Gaza.
"I call on my brothers in Hamas to declare a general amnesty and to guarantee people's lives," he added.
He blamed the past week's violence on security chiefs from President Mahmoud Abbas' secular Fatah faction in Gaza and accused them of having persecuted Hamas Islamists:
"They have committed crimes ... They have killed people just because they were bearded and because of their affiliations.
"They have abducted men and executed them before the eyes of their families," Haniyeh said.
"The situation reached an intolerable level and they have pushed people into reactions that have brought things to where they are now."
He also left a door open to talks, although Hamas officials have said previously this week that a condition for discussions with Fatah is that Hamas should have a leading say in security decisions for the Palestinians.
"I call for a national and comprehensive dialogue to begin immediately and on the basis of national rights," Haniyeh said.
Earlier in the West Bank, Abbas, seen as a pragmatist committed to negotiation, signed decrees dismissing a three-month-old unity government formed with Hamas and declaring a state of emergency.
But legal moves seemed overtaken by the violence.
Hamas said it "executed" a top Fatah "collaborator" and it issued a death list of other key supporters of President Mahmoud Abbas. Jubilant young Hamas gunmen hoisted green Islamist flags over captured Fatah buildings and pounded remaining Fatah bastions, including Abbas's Gaza base, with heavy weaponry.
The White House accused them of "acts of terror" and urged Arab governments to rally behind Abbas and the "moderates".
Israel and its allies contemplated the emergence of an aggressive, Islamist "Hamastan" on its border and a split between Gaza and the larger West Bank, controlled by Fatah.
At least 29 more people were killed in Gaza, hospital staff said, including 18 Fatah men found in the headquarters of Abbas's Preventive Security force, whose rout early in the day prompted Hamas to declare victory and the "liberation" of Gaza.
In all, at least 110 people have been killed in six days of fighting that many of Gaza's impoverished 1.5 million people saw as a civil war that has left them under religious rulers set on defying a crippling Israeli and Western embargo on the Strip.
The fighting has already halted aid shipments from Israel.
Casualty figures are unclear, as was the fate of Fatah fighters seen led away, bare-chested, after surrendering. There were unconfirmed reports of prisoners being shot.
A Fatah official in Gaza said he had seen eight colleagues gunned down while he escaped death "by a miracle".
Hamas's armed wing issued a statement saying it had "executed" Samih al-Madhoun of Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a close ally of Abbas's top security aide Mohammad Dahlan.
Fatah officials said Madhoun was alive but his family said he was missing. And a senior Hamas source insisted the Fatah leader had been captured and killed. Residents later said they saw Hamas fighters parading Madhoun's body in the street.
On Tuesday, as violence descended into brutality and charges of atrocities on both sides, Madhoun had told a radio station: "I swear to God I will kill every last member of Hamas."
For Hamas fighters, some in camouflage uniforms, the fall of the security headquarters was a cause for celebration. They fired gunshots in the air to seal their victory and handed out chocolates to local people in the coastal enclave.
"Allahu akbar!" (God is Greatest) one chanted through a megaphone from the roof of the beachfront headquarters of Fatah's intelligence service, captured later in the day.
Others paraded in the streets and showed off weaponry seized from Fatah, whose forces the United States has helped train and arm in a bid to counter the rise of Hamas -- to little effect.
In a statement of victory, Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri declared in Gaza: "What happened today in the Preventive Security headquarters was the second liberation of the Gaza Strip, this time from the herds of collaborators," the first being Israel's 2005 pullout of troops and Jewish settlers.
Diplomats told Reuters that an aide to Abbas had admitted that hundreds of Fatah's men ran from the battle or ran out of bullets during the fighting. Those in Abbas's own presidential compound in Gaza were among the few still holding out.
The Islamist group said it had also swept control of other Fatah strongholds across Gaza. Pro-Fatah broadcasts went off the air and the Voice of Palestine radio station was set ablaze.
Some Fatah gunmen retaliated against Hamas in the West Bank, shooting and wounding a Hamas man near Ramallah, seizing Hamas supporters in the towns of Jenin and in Nablus, where they also stormed a Hamas office and hurled its computers out the window.
Even businesses owned by Hamas supporters were targeted by angry crowds in the territory occupied by Israel, where some 2.5 million Palestinians live, in the hills around Jerusalem.
Abbas signed three decrees, aides said. One dissolves the Hamas-led "unity government" that Fatah joined in March under a Saudi-brokered deal aimed at ending internal violence and easing Western sanctions for Hamas's refusal to recognize Israel.
A second decree establishes a state of emergency and a third establishes an "emergency" government, officials said.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said an international force along Gaza's border with Egypt should be considered. But despite some international murmurs of assent, putting such a force together against Hamas's wishes seems unlikely for now.
- REUTERS
