The unprecedented violence, the worst since Hamas's shock election win a year ago, has scuttled intermittent talks on forming a national unity government and left the Gaza Strip  teetering on the brink of civil war.

 

 

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud offered on Sunday to hold talks in Mecca to stop the "disgraceful" fighting, a  proposal welcomed by faction leaders.

 

"I invite my brothers of the Palestinian people, represented by  their leaders ... to a quick meeting in their brotherly homeland Saudi Arabia ... to discuss their differences without any  intervention from outside parties," he said in an appeal carried by the state news agency SPA.

 

Khaled Meshaal, the ruling Hamas movement's political chief, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, both welcomed the offer, though no date for the meeting has yet been announced.

 

Several previous efforts to end the feuding, including a rare meeting between Meshaal and Abbas in Damascus, have proved fruitless.

 

 

But the killings and tit-for-tat abductions have continued in both the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank.

 

An explosion early on Sunday morning rocked the Gaza City home of a bodyguard of Mohammed Dahlan, a powerful Fatah commander. No casualties were reported.

 

Anti-tank rockets and mortar shells were also fired at Fatah's police headquarters.

 

Also on Sunday, Fatah supporters, many of them masked, set ablaze the  Nablus offices of the Hamas-controlled education ministry and  abducted 11 Hamas members.

Hamas fighters in turn seized Shabn Abu Assar, the chief of the Palestinian security forces for Gaza, but released him after two hours.

 

 

 

Throughout Gaza, the warring factions have set up roadblocks and  continue to trade bursts of machinegun fire, and anti-rocket and mortar shells.

 

The territory has become deserted, with shopkeepers boarding up shops and staying in the relative safety of their homes.