Lashing back at a crackdown by the Palestinian Authority, the armed wing of the militant Islamic group Hamas warned Sunday for the first time that it may turn its guns on Yasser Arafat's police force.
The Palestinian chief of police, Maj. Gen. Ghazi Jabali, said in an interview that his men would respond, and he issued orders from his Gaza headquarters to shoot at suspected assailants.The threat by the armed wing, known as the Qassam Brigades, contradicted Hamas' long-standing position that it would avoid civil war. And it signaled a deepening crisis with the Palestinian Authority following the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian accord in Washington last month.
The warning came in a leaflet, and its authenticity was questioned by a Hamas political leader.
Since a thwarted suicide car-bombing on an Israeli school bus in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, in which an Israeli soldier was killed, Palestinian police have rounded up an estimated 300 Hamas followers and put the group's leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, under house arrest.
Phone links to Yassin's home have been cut, along with the phones of several other political leaders of Hamas who were detained but later released. Masked police officers searched the sheik's home early Friday, seizing documents and confiscating weapons from his bodyguards. Approaches to the house were blocked Sunday by plainclothes officers armed with AK-47 rifles.
Jabali said arrests were continuing in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and that 30 to 40 members of Hamas' armed wing were being held. Police were searching for Muhammad Deif, a top Hamas fugitive believed to have masterminded Thursday's bombing and a series of other anti-Israeli attacks, Jabali said.