An Al-Aqsa TV footage shows Fatah fighters surrendering after the Preventive Security headquarters in Gaza City fell to Hamas on Thursday. (Reuters)

GAZA CITY/RAMALLAH, 15 June 2007 — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas yesterday dismissed the unity government led by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and declared a state of emergency in Palestinian territories hours after Hamas captured one of the last bastions of Fatah in the Gaza Strip.

Abbas will also set up an emergency government that will be responsible for implementing the “arrangements and orders connected to the state of emergency” and will call for early elections as soon as the situation permits, Tayeb Abdelrahim, a presidential aide, told a news conference in Ramallah.

Hamas rejected the presidential decrees. “In practical terms these decisions are worthless. Prime Minister Haniyeh remains the head of the government even if it was dissolved by the president,” senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said.

Earlier in the day, Hamas fighter overran the Preventive Security headquarters in Gaza City. At least 20 Palestinians were killed across Gaza yesterday, hospital officials said, including 18 Fatah men whose bodies were found in the Preventive Security compound.

Stripped to the waist, several defenders, their hands raised in surrender, were herded out of the compound by their Hamas captors. Hamas officials said fighters had orders to kill certain Fatah leaders and there were reports of prisoners being shot.

Fatah said Hamas shot dead seven of its fighters outside the Preventive Security building. A doctor at Shifa Hospital, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, said he examined two bodies that had been shot in the head at close range.

A witness named Amjad, who lives in a high-rise building that overlooks the Preventive Security complex, said men were killed before their wives and children. “They are executing them one by one,” Amjad said in a telephone interview, declining to give his full name for fear of reprisals. “They are carrying one of them on their shoulders, putting him on a sand dune, turning him around and shooting.”

The killers, he said, ignored appeals from neighborhood residents to spare the men’s lives.

Hamas’ armed wing said its fighters “executed” a leading Fatah militant who had topped their wanted list in the Gaza Strip. The Izz El-Deen Al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas said in a statement it had “executed the collaborator Samih Al-Madhoun,” a head of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Gaza.

A Hamas source said that Madhoun had been shot six times in the chest. Witnesses said Hamas supporters dragged the body of Madhoun through the streets of the Nusseirat refugee camp.

After capturing the Preventive Security complex, Hamas said it had given its fighters a list of wanted senior Fatah security officials to be hunted down and killed. For Hamas fighters, in their camouflage uniforms, the fall of the security headquarters was a cause for celebration. They fired gunshots in the air and handed out chocolates to local people in the coastal enclave.

“What happened today in the Preventive Security headquarters was the second liberation of the Gaza Strip, this time from the herds of collaborators,” Hamas’ Abu Zuhri declared. The first was Israel’s 2005 pullout of troops and Jewish settlers from Gaza.

Hamas fighters said they had seized tens of thousands of intelligence documents, including correspondence between the Palestinian Authority and others, including the CIA.

— Additional input from agencies