Hamas women protest West Bank killings

About 2,000 women Hamas supporters on Saturday protested against the West Bank-based Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas after violent clashes between his police and Hamas militants this week. "No to Abbas, No to Fayyad," the women in Gaza City chanted, referring to Western-backed Prime Minister Salam Fayyad who has launched a security crackdown in the Israeli-occupied West Bank over the past several months. The women waved green Hamas flags and held signs saying "Abbas's security forces are the bodyguards of the Zionists" and "No dialogue with arrests in the West Bank". Two Hamas members and a Palestinian policeman were killed in a shootout on Thursday in the West Bank town of Qalqilya, and several people were wounded in a similar gun battle there earlier in the week. An investigation by the al-Haq human rights organisation published on Thursday said Hamas militants opened fire first on both occasions. But senior Hamas leader Ahmed Bahar said Abbas and Fayyad should be "tried in a national court" and accused them of treason for allegedly cooperating with Israel against the Islamist movement. "You can either return to the Palestinian people and the dialogue in Cairo or you can continue your treachery in the embrace of the (Israeli) occupation," he told the crowd. "But this occupation will never do anything for you. They will toss you aside as they have tossed aside others in the past." The bitter divide between Hamas and Abbas's secular Fatah movement climaxed in June 2007, when Hamas gunmen drove his forces from the Gaza Strip in a week of bloody street battles that cleaved Palestinians into hostile rival entities. The two sides have held several rounds of negotiations in Cairo this year aimed at resolving their differences and forming a national unity government, but without visible progress.