GAZA CITY, 11 December 2006 — Unidentified gunmen shot at a convoy of Palestinian interior minister in the Gaza Strip yesterday as Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh criticized a decision of President Mahmoud Abbas to call early elections and said it would lead to chaos.

Interior Minister Saeed Seyam, a senior Hamas leader, escaped unharmed in the Gaza attack. Interior Ministry spokesman Khaled Abu Hilal said the minister’s bodyguards had chased and shot at the perpetrators, but nobody had been hurt.

He called the shooting “a result of the latest inflammatory statements against the government.”

Haniyeh, on an official visit to Iran, said early elections would lead to violence.

“The proposal... about holding early elections is the start of the creation of disorder in Palestine,” Haniyeh said at a news conference with local media.

“We studied that proposal and we believe it to be contrary to the legitimacy of the Palestinian government,” Iran’s official IRNA news agency quoted him as saying.

Haniyeh told Iranian state television late on Saturday that Abbas was to blame for the breakdown of unity government talks. “Unfortunately, the talks did not succeed because of the hostility and stubbornness of the brothers who are in the Palestinian leadership,” he said.

“They want the entire state and government to be entirely in the hands of non-Hamas people,” he said.

Hamas defeated Abbas’ Fatah in January in elections to the Palestinian Parliament, and formed a government in March. It has refused to bow to Western demands that it recognize the state of Israel, renounce violence and accept existing interim peace accords with the Jewish state.

Haniyeh said pressure from Abbas to accept the Western conditions made Hamas realize that “they do not want the formation of a national unity government; they want to expel Hamas from the government.”

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last word on all state matters, told Haniyeh he was right not to bow to pressure to recognize Israel and renounce armed struggle.

— Additional input from agencies