Abbas' security forces round up Hamas men in West Bank

West Bank: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' security forces have significantly widened a crackdown on Hamas in the West Bank in the past month.

They have doubled the number of detainees and are increasingly targeting the wives of activists, school teachers and others on the fringes of the militant group, Hamas officials say.

In the same period, police in Hamas-ruled Gaza have picked up dozens of Abbas loyalists, said officials in Abbas' Fatah movement.

The bitter rivals accuse each other of using the sweeps for political leverage, as they try to negotiate an elusive power-sharing deal and the terms of general elections in January.

A Palestinian unity government is seen as crucial to US efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, since Israel says it can't make concessions to the divided Palestinians.

Tit-for-tat detentions have been carried out over the two years since Hamas overran Gaza, ousting the forces loyal to Abbas, who was left with just the West Bank. Since then, each side has being trying to assert more control and wipe out the rival's power base, amid persistent allegations of mistreatment of detainees.

Since June 2007, Abbas' security forces - fearful of a Hamas takeover in the West Bank - detained hundreds of Hamas activists, closed Hamas-run charities and dried up the group's funding.

Hamas legislator Mahmoud Ramahi said this week that there has been a sharp spike in detentions, from 460 in custody at the end of May to a total of 887 behind bars a month later, a new record.

"June was a crazy month for detention," Ramahi said. "It's clear that they [Fatah activists] want to put political pressure on the movement by forcing it to accept Fatah's conditions for reconciliation and to control the movement's activities."

Several Abbas aides dismissed the Hamas allegations of political arrests. They claimed this week that the militants were involved in plots to attack Palestinian security compounds and government officials in the West Bank, but provided no evidence.

A Hamas list of names of detainees showed that among them were several university professors and mosque leaders, seven municipal council members, school teachers and at least five journalists for Hamas-affiliated media outlets.

Fifty have been held for nine months or more and only six have been put on trial, where all were convicted of weapons possession, Ramahi said.

Ramallah (DPA) Members of a Hamas cell arrested in the West Bank last month had been tracking the movements of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with the "clear" intention to assassinate him, senior officials in Abbas' Fatah party said yesterday.

Palestinian National Authority Secretary-General Tayeb Abdul Rahim had announced the arrest of 10 Hamas members on Monday, saying the cell had been preparing to assassinate leading officials in Abbas' administration.

The Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported yesterday that since then, new details have emerged and that Abbas himself had been among the targets.

Hamas and Fatah have been locked in a bloody power struggle. The rivalry erupted after Hamas unexpectedly beat Fatah in 2006 parliamentary elections and peaked in 2007, when Hamas violently seized sole control of Gaza by storming the headquarters of Abbas' Fatah-dominated security forces throughout the strip.

The sides have been holding Egyptian-mediated talks in Cairo, in a bid to reconcile their differences and allow new elections to take place by January 2010.

"Hamas' intention was to scuttle the reconciliation talks in Cairo and to create chaos in the West Bank, in contrast to the sense of security that has characterised the territory for the past two years," Fatah spokesman Fahmi Zarir told Ha'aretz.