GAZA, June 20 — Mahmoud Zahar, perhaps the most influential Hamas leader in Gaza, warned Wednesday that Fatah’s effort to repress Hamas in the West Bank could lead to Fatah’s downfall there as well.
A man wounded in fighting in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah rested in a Gaza City hospital on Wednesday. Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, the Palestinian president, said that he would not negotiate with Hamas.
In an interview here, Mr. Zahar, the former Palestinian foreign minister, said Hamas would not sit idle if its political rival, Fatah, dominant in the occupied West Bank and backed by the United States and Israel, continued to attack Hamas institutions and politicians.
“If they continue to dismantle the local elections in the West Bank and punish Hamas there, the United States and Israel will face another surprise there,” Mr. Zahar said. Asked how, he said, “The way we defend ourselves against Israel and this occupation.” Pressed if that meant attacks and suicide bombings, he smiled and replied: “You said that.” Then he added: “We are ending the reign of the spies and collaborators in Fatah.”
In recent days, Fatah gunmen have been attacking and burning Hamas institutions in the West Bank, and its forces have arrested a number of elected Hamas officials there as well. Mr. Zahar, a physician singled out in the past by Israeli forces who killed one of his sons and his son-in-law, spoke on a day when Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, the Palestinian president, said he would not negotiate with Hamas. In a televised speech, he said that “there is no dialogue with those murderous terrorists” and added: “Our main goal is to prevent sedition from spreading to the West Bank.”
Also on Wednesday, at least six Palestinian militants were killed in clashes with Israeli soldiers in Gaza and the West Bank, and the Israeli Air Force attacked two rocket launchers in northern Gaza after they had fired two rockets into Israel. It was the first time the Israeli military had responded to rocket fire or clashed with Palestinians in Gaza since Hamas seized power there last week.
Some nine Qassam rockets were launched into Israel from Gaza, with one Israeli lightly wounded. Islamic Jihad and Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, linked to Fatah, claimed responsibility.
In his interview, Mr. Zahar gave a ringing defense of Hamas’s ability to defeat what he called Israeli and American plans to destroy Hamas and its government.
The first surprise for them, he said, was when Israel failed to break the Palestinian uprising, or intifada; the second when “the resistance succeeded in pushing Israel out of Gaza”; the third when Hamas won the legislative elections of January 2006; the fourth when “they thought Hamas would collapse as a government in three months through their sanctions”; and the last, so far, he said, was the recent routing of Fatah, destroying what he called an American-Israeli plan to “end Hamas militarily.”
Mr. Zahar said that there was no alternative but to renew political talks on a consensus between Hamas and Fatah.
Mr. Abbas, with American support, fired the Hamas-led unity government and named a new emergency cabinet, whose powers run now only to the West Bank. Under Palestinian law, its powers must be renewed by an act of the legislature. But Hamas dominates the legislature, which lacks a quorum in any event since Israel has detained up to a third of its members because they belong to Hamas.
Hamas held a rally here on Wednesday night to protest Mr. Abbas’s speech. “What he said was disgusting and not appropriate for the Palestinian president,” said a Hamas spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri.
Mustafa Sawaf, the chief editor of a Hamas daily newspaper, Felesteen (Palestine), begun four months ago, said that Hamas felt forced into a confrontation now. Hamas had its own intelligence service, which was fully aware of what he called the plans of Fatah. “Fatah was preparing to get rid of Hamas,” he said.
Lt. Gen. Keith W. Dayton, the American security coordinator for the Palestinians, was pressing ahead with up to $80 million in aid to train and equip Mr. Abbas’s Presidential Guard, Mr. Sawaf noted.
“The American administration opposed the unity government and worked hard with Palestinians close to Abbas to fail the government with all means, even if it led to civil war,” he said.
“So given all this, is it logical for Hamas to wait until it is crushed?” asked Mr. Sawaf. “If you put a cat in a corner and keep beating it, the cat will fight back.”
The Americans say that their effort to aid, train and equip the elite Fatah forces was to protect the crossings to Israel and to deter Hamas, not to start a civil war.
Mr. Sawaf acknowledged that Hamas had been doing military planning for some time, but was itself surprised at the low morale of the Fatah forces and how quickly they disintegrated. While there were reports that Hamas had carefully prepared by digging tunnels for explosives, for example under the Preventive Security headquarters in Khan Yunis, Mr. Sawaf denied it. “Any tunnels we dug were to try to protect ourselves from Israeli planes,” he said. “We dug them to try to hit Israeli forces” in the event of another Israeli incursion, much the way Hezbollah fought Israeli troops in southern Lebanon, he said.
Mr. Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, in his speech again accused Hamas of digging a tunnel under a road he would pass in order to kill him, but “the Israelis would pass the same way,” Mr. Sawaf said. “If Hamas wanted to kill Abu Mazen, it would be easy. It would not need a tunnel.”
Mr. Sawaf’s West Bank office in Ramallah has been destroyed, and the Palestinian paper Al Ayyam has refused to continue printing his paper in the West Bank.
Israel continued Wednesday to take sick and wounded Palestinians out of Gaza to hospitals in Israel, but officials said they were frustrated at their inability to coordinate with the Palestinian side; the Red Cross was doing most of the coordination.
Alan Johnston, the BBC’s Gaza correspondent, marked his 100th day in captivity on Wednesday, in the hands of a shadowy group called Army of Islam, connected to a part of the Gazan Dagmush clan. The leader of the group, Mumtaz Dagmush, has taken up a form of radical Islam, and Mr. Zahar of Hamas called him “ignorant and illiterate — he can’t even read and write.”
The group has demanded the freedom of a West Bank-born preacher, Abu Qutada, now in British jails on terrorism charges, and is also said to be demanding $5 million.
A member of the clan was shot dead on Wednesday by a family affiliated with Hamas, but Mr. Zahar said the issue was blood revenge, not politics. In this matter, as in so many things in Gaza and the divided Palestinian world, temperatures were rising, not falling.
But after hot days in which children were kept at home by worried parents, the beaches of Gaza suddenly seemed to explode Wednesday evening with the cries of hundreds of children returning to the sea, throwing themselves into the waves beneath a burnt-orange sun.
