HAMAS DEPLOYS ITS STORMTROOPERS IN GAZA

Gunmen Loyal to Hamas Deployed Across Gaza.

In the southern city of Khan Younis, about 40 members of the new force pulled up to the Education Ministry, jumped from their jeeps and fired in the air to break up a peaceful protest of recent college graduates who want teaching jobs. The teachers were protesting an application fee. The gunmen moved into the building, where they bludgeoned protesters with clubs and rifles, demonstrators said. “We were protesting peacefully, and suddenly these gunmen came and assaulted us,” said a protester as he applied a bandage to a small gash on his head. “We don’t know who they are or why they came here.” He identified himself only as Khaled, saying he feared retribution.

The new Hamas force is headed by Jamal Abu Samhadana, a bombmaker wanted by Israel who is suspected of masterminding a deadly attack on a U.S. diplomatic convoy in 2003. Hamas officials said the new force’s aim was to bring order to Gaza, where marauding gangs of armed men routinely terrorize citizens.

NOT TO BE OUTDONE, FATAH IS FLOODING THE STREET WITH ITS OWN BROWNSHIRTS. LET THE CIVIL WAR BEGIN!

Abbas, Hamas mount rival shows of force.

GAZA (Reuters) - President Mahmoud Abbas ordered the deployment of thousands of Palestinian police in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday after the new Hamas government, in a challenge to his authority, posted its own armed contingent on the streets.

A senior Palestinian security official said the deployment, to be fully implemented by Thursday, would be the largest since police fanned out ahead of last year’s Israeli pullout from the impoverished coastal territory after 38 years of occupation.

Both Abbas and the Hamas interior minister said they sought to stem bloodshed by rival Gaza gunmen. But with the security forces’ loyalties often divided between Hamas and Abbas’s long-dominant Fatah faction, further violence remained possible.

Hours earlier, Interior Minister Saeed Seyam declared a Hamas-led, 3,000-member police force operational. About 30 of its men, armed and wearing military fatigues with Islamist insignia, patrolled central Gaza and the strip’s main highway.

Seyam told reporters the new contingent would tackle the “chaos and anarchy and increasing assaults on our people,” an apparent reference to violence that included the killing of two Hamas militants by Gaza gunmen in the past two days.