GAZA CITY (AFP) — Hamas rounded up at least 200 rival Fatah party members in night-time raids in the Gaza Strip, officials said on Tuesday, a day after Islamist gunmen killed seven people at a mass rally.
The official Palestinian press denounced the killings as a "massacre" and hundreds of Palestinians took to the streets in West Bank towns to vent their anger at Hamas.
The Hamas force that has policed Gaza since the Islamist group violently seized power in June "arrested scores of senior Fatah members and members of our branch offices," senior Fatah official Ibrahim Abu al-Naga told AFP.
The raids came hours after Hamas police violently dispersed a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Fatah supporters, who had massed in the heart of Gaza City to commemorate Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's death.
Seven people were killed and another 130 wounded in the violence, medics said, in an incident condemned by human rights groups.
"Human rights groups are against everything that happened yesterday, the excessive use of deadly force against tens of thousands of celebrators," Khalil Abu Shamala, director of the Dameer human rights group, told AFP.
"The arrests of Fatah leaders indicate that the government run by the Hamas movement wants to prevent all activities of the Fatah movement that could show its power in the street and influence the situation in Gaza," he added.
A spokesman for the Hamas-run Executive Force, a paramilitary group that polices the coastal enclave, confirmed it had arrested 200 people involved in Monday's violence, adding that many would soon be released.
Fatah spokesman Hazem Abu Shanab said Hamas arrested about 400 Fatah members following the rally, and had searched numerous houses and confiscated personal effects.
Hamas blamed Fatah gunmen for instigating the clashes, accusing them of firing down on police from the rooftops around the square, but that account was disputed by an AFP correspondent and several witnesses.
Monday's gathering was the largest mobilisation of support for the Fatah party of Arafat and his successor Mahmud Abbas since Hamas routed the movement's security forces in a week of bloody clashes five months ago.
In an interview with the Hamas-run Palestine newspaper, senior Hamas leader Mahmud al-Zahar said his movement had "to take all necessary steps to prevent a repeat of the troubling events in cooperation with official forces."
Flags in the occupied West Bank flew at half-mast and schools and shops across Gaza remained closed after Abbas declared a three-day period of mourning for those killed by "the bullets of the putschists", referring to Hamas.
About 1,500 people demonstrated against Hamas in the West Bank political capital of Ramallah on Tuesday and another 1,000 rallied in Bethlehem.
In Ramallah, demonstrators waving Palestinian flags and yellow Fatah banners marched through the streets cursing Hamas chiefs and praising Arafat, who died in a Paris hospital three years ago.
"From Ramallah to Gaza, Abu Ammar is a symbol of pride!" the crowds in Ramallah chanted, referring to Arafat by his nom de guerre.
On more than one wall demonstrators had written "Meshaal+Haniya+Zahar+Siyam = Occupation", using the last names of senior Hamas leaders, while other signs equated the "Hamas militias" with the Israeli army.
Protestors also drew caricatures of Hamas, including drawings of a bearded man aiming a gun at his head with the caption "Hamas means suicide".
The Palestinian Authority's official newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadid called the shootings a "massacre", while the leading Al-Quds newspaper said the rally had become a "referendum" on Hamas rule in Gaza.
"Everyone who went out into the streets yesterday did so, not for the commemoration of Abu Ammar but to voice their opposition to the current situation in the Gaza Strip," Al-Quds said.
The rally saw the city centre filled with a sea of the yellow flags of the Fatah party, whose forces were driven from the Gaza Strip in a bloody Hamas takeover in mid-June.
The Palestinian Authority which Arafat set up in 1994 now controls only scattered autonomous areas of the occupied West Bank.
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