Israel suspended an offensive against militants in the Gaza Strip, including targeted killings, as clashes between Hamas gunmen and Palestinian police trying to enforce an arms ban killed at least three in Gaza City.
Medical sources said three Palestinians, including a police major, had been killed and 50 wounded after Hamas militants fired rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons at a police station in the Shati refugee camp.
Fighting also erupted at the nearby Shifa hospital after two Palestinians wounded in the earlier firefight were brought there for treatment.
A security source said the clashes began when Mohammed Rantissi, the son of a Hamas leader assassinated last year in an Israeli airstrike, got into a dispute with another Palestinian who wanted to use a bank ATM machine ahead of him.
The fight escalated when police attempted to arrest Rantissi as part of ban on carrying weapons in public in the strife-torn Gaza Strip which Palestinian security forces recently began enforcing.
"Hamas bears entire responsibility for what happened. It violated the law and the national consensus," said an interior ministry statement.
Armed factions such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad have refused demands by Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas to lay down their weapons since Israel's pullout from Gaza last month but have agreed that their activists should not carry their weapons in public.
Abbas has repeatedly pledged to tackle the spiralling lawlessness in the Palestinian territories, particularly in Gaza, where gunmen frequently operate beyond the law in the name of "resistance".
The fighting came after Israel ended a campaign of attacks that has killed four hardline Islamists, with an aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon saying the raids had taught the Palestinians the "new rules of the game".
"We have decided to suspend the offensive operations that we launched last week in response to rocket fire from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel," the official in Sharon's office told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Israel launched a series of air strikes on Gaza last weekend in the aftermath of a barrage of rocket attacks by Hamas fired from Gaza into Israel, but the militant group dismissed the announcement as a ploy to split the Palestinian people.
"This statement is part of the propaganda campaign to blackmail our people and to put pressure on the Palestinian Authority to fight against the factions and resistance groups," said spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri.
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