At least six Palestinians were wounded, one seriously, in a gun battle that erupted between rival Palestinian Authority security forces in Gaza City on Monday. In a separate incident in the northern Gaza Strip, a Hamas activist was killed during an armed clash with members of Islamic Jihad. Eyewitnesses said the Gaza City clashes started around noon, when members of the Preventive Security Service affiliated with former security minister Muhammad Dahlan opened fire on a number of security officers from Military Intelligence, headed by Gen. Musa Arafat. The confrontation began when Preventive Security personnel tried to arrest Muhammad Abu Jarrar, a top Military Intelligence officer, at his home. Jarrar and some members of his family opened fire at the force, seriously wounding Tamer Daghmash. In the evening, the clashes spread to other parts of Gaza City, with both sides using hand grenades and assault rifles. Daghmash's friends attacked Military Intelligence headquarters, wounding two officers. In retaliation, scores of Military Intelligence officers attacked the Preventive Security headquarters. The tension started on Saturday, when Arafat's security officers kidnapped a member of the Preventive Security in response to the abduction of one of their men a few days earlier. The two kidnapped men complained that they had been tortured. The armed clashes ended on Tuesday morning, following the intervention of senior Fatah officials. Tensions have been running high between the two security services since the appointment of Arafat as overall commander of the PA security forces in the Gaza Strip last July. Dahlan's supporters have launched a series of attacks on Arafat's men and offices in different parts of the Gaza Strip. Earlier this month, Arafat narrowly escaped an assassination attempt when a car bomb was detonated near his convoy. No group claimed responsibility, although many Palestinians believe that Dahlan's supporters were behind it.
In other scenes of lawlessness in the West Bank, gunmen belonging to the Aksa Martyrs Brigades closed down the offices of the Palestinian Legislative Council and PA Tax Authority in Jenin. They entered the offices and ordered all workers to leave within 10 minutes before closing them indefinitely. Zakariya Zubeidi, commander of the Aksa Martyrs Brigades in Jenin, said the move was to protest against the failure of the PA to pay salaries to the families of Palestinians killed in the violence. "The Palestinian parliament has approved a series of laws that harm the monthly fees allocated for the victims of the intifada and the families of the martyrs," he said. "This is at a time when senior PA officials are wasting public funds and spending money on themselves." He also accused the tax department of deducting almost half of the payments sent to the families.