...Local Hamas commanders have vowed to fight until the Gaza Strip is totally under their control. Fatah commanders blamed their leaders for failing to issue clear orders on how to retaliate. The latest fighting has been particularly brutal, with gunmen conducting execution-style killings and throwing live victims from rooftops.

“As I am talking to you, bullets are flying over our houses. My house is besieged by Hamas,” said Mahar Miqdad, a Fatah spokesman in Gaza. “There is no chance for any unity with Hamas. They are conducting a cleansing of Fatah,” he said. On Monday, Hamas militants killed Jamal Abu al-Jediyan, the most senior Fatah official in northern Gaza. Mr Miqdad said that he had been shot 40 times in a streetside execution. He was buried yesterday...

...During recent fighting in the Gaza Strip, armed Palestinian groups have committed serious violations of international humanitarian law, in some cases amounting to war crimes, Human Rights Watch said today.

In internal Palestinian fighting over the last three days, both Fatah and Hamas military forces have summarily executed captives, killed people not involved in hostilities, and engaged in gun battles with one another inside and near Palestinian hospitals. On Saturday, armed Palestinians from Islamic Jihad and the Fatah-affiliated Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade used a vehicle with a "TV" insignia to attack an Israeli military position on the border with Gaza.

"These attacks by both Hamas and Fatah constitute brutal assaults on the most fundamental humanitarian principles," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director for Human Rights Watch. "The murder of civilians not engaged in hostilities and the willful killing of captives are war crimes, pure and simple."

On Sunday, Hamas military forces captured 28-year-old Muhammad Swairki, a cook for President Mahmoud Abbas's presidential guard, and executed him by throwing him to his death, with his hands and legs tied, from a 15-story apartment building in Gaza City. Later that night, Fatah military forces shot and captured Muhammad al-Ra'fati, a Hamas supporter and mosque preacher, and threw him from a Gaza City high-rise apartment building. On Monday, Hamas military forces attacked the home in Beit Lahiya of Jamal Abu al-Jadiyan, a senior Fatah official, captured him, and executed him on the street with multiple gunshots. On Tuesday, there were reports of additional killings of individuals not involved in hostilities...