Hamas close to outright control of Gaza strip

Hamas fighters overran one of the rival Fatah movement's most important Palestinians security installations in the Gaza Strip today.

Witnesses said the victors dragged vanquished gunmen from the building and murdered them in the street.

The capture of the Preventive Security headquarters was a major step forward in Hamas' attempts to complete its takeover of all of Gaza.

The moderate President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, for the first time in five days of fierce fighting, ordered his elite presidential guard to strike back. But his forces were crumbling fast under the onslaught by the better-armed and better-disciplined Islamic fighters.

Fatah officials said seven of their fighters were shot dead in the street outside Preventive Security. A witness, Jihad Abu Ayad, said the men were being killed before their wives and children.

"They are killing them one by one," Abu Ayad said. "They are carrying one of them on their shoulders, putting him on a sand dune, turning him around and shooting."

Some of the Hamas fighters kneeled down outside the building, touching their foreheads to the ground in prayer. Others led Fatah fighters out of the building, some of them shirtless or in their underwear, holding their arms in the air. Several of the Fatah men flinched as the crack of gunfire split the air.

"We are telling our people that the past era has ended and will not return, " Islam Shahawan, a spokesman for Hamas' militia, told Hamas radio. "The era of justice and Islamic rule have arrived."

Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, heralded what he called "Gaza's second liberation," after Israel's 2005 evacuation of the coastal strip.

As Hamas took this major battle spoil, Mr Abbas was meeting in the West Bank town of Ramallah with the decision-making bodies of Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organisation. One aide said Mr Abbas was considering pulling Fatah out of its governing coalition with Hamas.

Hamas was also training its guns at three other key command centres in Gaza City.

Rocket-propelled grenades were being fired toward Mr Abbas' Gaza compound, provoking return fire from his presidential guard. For the first time since the fighting began, Mr Abbas ordered his guard to go on the offensive against Hamas at the compound, and not simply maintain a defensive posture, an aide said.

The intelligence service compound was also under siege, as Hamas fired dozens of rocket-propelled grenades in its direction.

Hamas said it was on the verge of taking over the building. But the director of the intelligence service in Gaza, Mohammed al-Masri, said in a text message that the compound was still in Fatah hands.

Mortar shells were lobbed overnight at a third key security headquarters, the National Security building.

Elsewhere in Gaza, clashes broke out at three Fatah-allied villages near the southern town of Khan Younis, but Hamas encountered little resistance as it took over security positions and homes belonging to pro-Fatah officers. A teenager was killed in the crossfire.

The two factions have warred sporadically since Hamas took power from Fatah last year, but never with such intensity.

Hamas reluctantly brought Fatah into the coalition in March to quell an earlier round of violence, but the uneasy partnership began crumbling last month over control of the powerful security forces.

Some 80 people, most of them militants, have been killed since a spike in violence on Sunday sent Gaza into civil war. At least 15 people died on Thursday.

Hospitals were operating without water, electricity and blood. Even holed up inside their homes, Gazans were not able to escape fighting that turned apartment buildings into battlefields.