Fatah: Hamas cracking down on public sector workers on strike in Gaza

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah faction accused its Hamas rival on Wednesday of cracking down on striking health workers in the Gaza Strip.

"They have been sending their militias to doctors' houses to bring them by force to the hospitals," said Bassam Zakarna, head of a pro-Fatah trade union supporting the strike that began last Saturday in the Hamas-run territory.

Hassan Khalaf, an official in the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip, declined to comment directly on the allegations but said: "Those people have been putting patients to death by abandoning their duties."

Some 85 percent of education workers and about 70 percent of primary health care personnel have walked off their jobs in the Gaza Strip, paralyzing services, a UN source said.

They accuse Hamas of transferring Fatah supporters from their posts for political reasons, an allegation the Islamist group has denied.

"I receive telephone calls all the time from doctors in Gaza who are being threatened with arrest and others who had been questioned and insulted," Zakarna said.

Basim Naeem, the Hamas-appointed health minister in the Gaza Strip, described the strike as politically motivated and accused doctors of compromising the lives of their patients.

But a pro-Fatah doctor, who asked not to be identified, said "some young physicians who refused to return to work were imprisoned".

Fatah also said Hamas security forces have closed down many private medical clinics belonging to striking doctors.

Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip from Fatah forces in June 2007. Egyptian attempts to broker a reconciliation have made little progress.