The Hamas organisation that controls Gaza has killed the leader of a radical Islamist group in a shootout in the territory today.
The fighting erupted yesterday when Hamas forces surrounded a mosque in the southern Gaza town of Rafah on the Egypt border where about 100 members of Jund Ansar Allah, or the Soldiers of the Companions of God, were gathered.
The head of the radical Islamic group, Abdel-Latif Moussa, was killed when fighting resumed after dawn today, Ihab Ghussein a Hamas Interior Ministry spokesman said this morning.
"The operation is over and what is going on right now is searching and clearing the area," he said, adding that it wasn't clear if Moussa died from an explosives belt he was wearing or from Hamas gunfire.
Dr. Moaiya Hassanain of the Palestinian Health Ministry official in Gaza said a total of 22 people, including six Hamas police officers and an 11-year-old girl, were killed in the violence that also wounded 150.
The group's Web site vowed vengeance, meanwhile, saying "we swear to God to avenge the martyrs' blood and we will turn their women to widows."
Hamas also confirmed the death in the fighting of one of its high level commanders, Abu-Jibril Shimali, whom Israel said was behind the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier three years ago in a cross border raid.
Moussa staged a challenge to Hamas's nationalist brand of Palestinian Islam by declaring an "Islamic emirate" in Gaza yesterday.
About 15 gunmen, including a Syrian national, and six Hamas policemen were killed in the violence, the spokesman said.
He said about 40 "outlaws" affiliated with the group were arrested in Rafah, near the Egyptian border.
Moussa was known to followers by the al Qaeda-style nom de guerre Abu al-Nour al-Maqdessi. His group espoused a pan-Arab militancy aligned with al Qaeda, which uses the historical term "emirate" to mean clerical rule across the Islamic world.
Hamas's comment that a Syrian gunmen had been killed in the clashes contradicted an earlier statement by Ismail Haniyeh, who heads Gaza's Hamas government, that no non-Palestinian fighters were in the territory, as alleged by Israel which says veterans of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq live in Gaza.
Moussa's group announced its presence in Gaza two months ago after three of its members were killed in a border raid on an Israeli base in which gunmen rode on horseback.
Yesterday, nearly 100 of the group's masked fighters in Pakistani-style dress, and with long hair in a style believed to imitate the Prophet Mohammad, carried automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
Hamas's leaders say it is a moderate movement while independent analysts say it gives priority to Palestinian nationalist goals over the international religious aims that are typical of al Qaeda's network.
Israel unilaterally ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip in 2005 and withdrew its forces. Islamist radicals began to surface in Gaza after the takeover of the Israeli-blockaded enclave by Hamas in 2007, when it routed the forces of the secular Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Agencies