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GAZA - Hamas Islamist fighters appeared in command of much of the Gaza Strip today after battering forces loyal to Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Diplomats said a top aide to Abbas told them that some of the president's men ran for their lives, others ran out of bullets and that after five days of battle "Gaza is lost".
Abbas and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas made their clearest move yet to reach out to the other, agreeing in a telephone call on the need to staunch the bloodshed, according to a Hamas official and a television station run by Fatah.
With the machineguns and mortars of civil war echoing in Gaza City after dark, hospital officials tallied another 31 deaths over the day, including a teenager at a peace rally and schoolboy shot leaving an exam room.
But most of the dead were fighters from Abbas's secular Fatah faction and their Hamas rivals.
Each accused the other of more atrocities in a vicious fight that has killed 79 people since Saturday. With Fatah forces routed or surrounded in many spots, Palestinians' two small territories, Gaza and the West Bank, were ever more estranged.
Abbas and Haniyeh agreed on "the need to end the fighting and return to the language of dialogue", Abbas's Palestine Television said in a late-night news flash.
Haniyeh was in Gaza, the coastal enclave whose poor voters propelled Hamas to power 18 months ago. Abbas was in Ramallah, in the West Bank hills above Jerusalem from where his late predecessor Yasser Arafat dominated and united Palestinians.
Israel, which once seemed close to a peace deal with Arafat that would have given Palestinians a state, served notice that their chances of achieving that now could dim further if Hamas defeats Fatah, its secular partner in a unity government.
- REUTERS
