Gaza City – A fierce gun battle erupted Monday outside the Palestinian parliament building between rival Palestinian forces, killing one man, wounding about a dozen people and deepening the sense of anarchy gripping the Gaza Strip.
Passers-by scattered in panic as gunmen – some of them belonging to a new Hamas-led police force and others to a unit loyal to Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas – crouched against graffiti-covered walls and behind parked cars, squeezing off round after round from their automatic rifles and firing rocket-propelled grenades in each other’s direction.
A driver for the Jordanian ambassador in Gaza was killed by a stray bullet in the fighting, which raged for nearly two hours in broad daylight in the run-down heart of Gaza City. Each faction denied starting the shootout.
The spiraling violence was expected to figure prominently in discussions today at the White House between President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Both the Bush administration and Olmert’s government are grappling with the question of how best to deal with the Hamas-dominated government and the moderate-minded Abbas, who was elected separately a year before Hamas’ upset election victory in January.
Tensions in Gaza have been mounting since Hamas took power in March. They soared last week when Hamas sent a new 3,000-member police force into the streets, in explicit defiance of Abbas’ veto of its deployment. Since then, gunmen from the Hamas contingent and those of Abbas’ Fatah faction have engaged in an uneasy standoff, narrowly eyeing each another while laying claim to adjacent street corners.
Recent days have brought a steady drumbeat of ambush- style shootings and other reprisal attacks.
On Saturday, someone tried to assassinate a senior security chief, an ally of Abbas, who was gravely injured when a booby- trapped elevator exploded in his guarded compound. Fatah officials stopped short of blaming Hamas for the attempt.
