GAZA CITY, 15 December 2007 — Hamas forces yesterday arrested a political adviser to Palestinian Premier Salam Fayyad, whose government was appointed after the Islamists seized control of the Gaza Strip last June.

“Interior Ministry security forces arrested Omar Al-Ghul. An investigation has begun into a case against the law,” said Hamas spokesman Ihab Al-Ghssein.

Ghul, 56, was picked up from his Gaza City home after “a decision was taken to open an investigation,” Ghssein said.

President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the arrest from Jordan, where he was en route to an international donors’ conference in Paris on Monday, three weeks after Israel and the Palestinians resumed peace talks in the United States.

In comments relayed by his aide Yasser Abed Rabbo, Abbas criticized the “kidnapping” as a “criminal and dangerous act adding to the long list of crimes committed daily by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.”

Relatives of Ghul said masked gunmen burst into his flat in the dead of night and kidnapped the political independent, who advised the West Bank-based Fayyad.

“He came back from Ramallah in the day because his mother-in-law died. Around 1:30 a.m., Hamas gunmen came and burst into the flat,” his son Nadir Al-Ghul said from the West Bank political capital.

“My father was once threatened on the telephone. They told him that if he came to Gaza, he would be arrested. They didn’t give their names, but we are sure they are from Hamas,” he added. Later yesterday, dozens of people gathered outside Ghul’s house to protest the arrest. “We condemn this arrest and demand that Hamas immediately release him. Hamas must stop these methods which it uses since June,” Abdel Halim Al-Ghul, a relative of the premier’s adviser, told reporters.

Meanwhile, two Palestinians were killed and 35 others, including children, wounded yesterday when a grenade exploded during a Gaza funeral for a man killed in an Israeli air raid, a medical official said.

The funeral was attended by dozens of supporters of Fatah, the Palestinian political party to which the dead man belonged.

A mourner attending the funeral in the Sheikh Radunan area of northern Gaza City said that “someone fired a grenade into the crowd.”

Medics said two people were killed in the blast and 35 people were wounded, some of them seriously, rounding up an earlier casualty toll of around 20 people wounded.

A Hamas police spokesman said the blast was accidental. “The initial information that we have is that the grenade exploded in one of the mourner’s hands,” Islam Shahwan said.

The funeral was for Nasser Khalil Al-Masaari, who was killed on Thursday when an Israeli aircraft fired a missile at the taxi in which he was traveling. Palestinian officials said an Islamic Jihad fighter, who got into the taxi after firing rockets against Israel, was the target of the strike.

The Jihad operative, Masaari and another person were killed in the air strike in eastern Gaza City on Thursday evening.

Israel regularly carries out air and ground operations against militants in Gaza in an effort to curb the ongoing rocket fire against southern Israel.