For a second day in a row, Hamas fighters raided the homes of security personnel across the territory, confiscating weapons as they consolidated their victory after a week of bloody street battles, witnesses said.

"Members of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades took my weapons under threat," Osama, an officer in the pro-Fatah police force, told AFP, referring to Hamas's armed wing.

Witnesses said looters ransacked Arafat's Gaza home, making off with the late president's personal belongings.

"I saw armed people entering inside, stealing Arafat's things and burning one of the bedrooms," said one witness who lives across the street but didn't want his name used for fear of reprisals by the Islamists.

The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) headed by president Mahmud Abbas rejected an offer for dialogue with Hamas on Saturday, accusing the Islamist movement of "massacres."

PLO executive committee secretary general Yasser Abed Rabbo issued a blunt rejection of the olive branch offered by Hamas's exiled political supremo, Khaled Meshaal, after the Islamists' bloody seizure of the Gaza Strip.

"I tell Meshaal that there can not be dialogue with those who commit massacres in Gaza," he said.

Meshaal said on Friday that Hamas still recognised Abbas's authority and called for renewed talks under Arab auspices to recreate a united administration for the Palestinian territories.

On Saturday, masked members of Hamas's armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, stood guard on the roof of the house, not allowing anyone in, an AFP photographer witnessed.

Arafat died in a Paris hospital in 2004 and his home in Gaza has stood empty since then, protected by guards.

Gaza witnessed a looting spree on Friday, after Hamas fighters in the territory overran the mainstream security forces loyal to Arafat's successor Mahmud Abbas.

After a week of fighting that killed more than 110 people and sent terrified residents indoors, life gradually assumed its normal routine in the impoverished territory.

Food stalls reopened and cars returned to the streets, as residents ventured out to take stock of the new reality on the ground.

No police could be seen in their headquarters in Gaza City, with only members of Hamas's paramilitary force milling around the building.

The West Bank-based chief of police -- a Fatah loyalist -- banned officers in Gaza from cooperating with Hamas, saying those who did so would be treated as mutineers.

"General Kamal al-Sheikh has ordered all police in the Gaza Strip to cease work and not to cooperate with the interior minister and the sacked government," a statement said.

"All those who disobey these orders will have to assume their responsibilities before the law and will be considered as mutineers who refuse direct orders from their hierarchy."

Another police officer Said Osama, who like his colleagues asked that his full name be withheld, told AFP that he had no intention of working under Hamas.

"I cannot work now with this illegal government. Ezzedine al-Qassam are taking our arms as members of Fatah. But as a police officer, I am under the law and I do not violate the law," he said.

Abu Khalil, a 35-year-old police captain, echoed the sentiment.

"I will not go back to work, no matter what it costs me," he told AFP. "Not after what we have seen in the past few days. We don't trust them, they are killers. I am not Fatah and I am not Hamas. I'm a Palestinian policeman, I am here to protect my people, not kill them."

Zaki, a 35-year-old member of the pro-Fatah security services, vowed not to surrender his arms to the Islamists.

"We will not give up our arms, whatever it may cost us," he said. "All of us are hiding our guns. They will not find anything.

"If they threaten us, we will go out at night like them, put on masks like them and fight them."

He told how Hamas gunmen had ransacked and burned the home of a fellow security officer.

"Hamas has launched a purge operation against the members of preventive security. What they are doing is revenge."

Meanwhile, gunmen loyal to the secular Fatah faction of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas stormed the parliament building in the West Bank Saturday in search of supporters of the rival Hamas movement.

Militants from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade briefly scuffled with the Hamas-backed deputy speaker of parliament but the intervention of a Fatah official helped prevent him being abducted.

"Armed men from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades entered Hassan Khreisheh's office and shouted that he was an ally of Hamas," the deputy speaker's spokesman said.

"There was a scuffle but he wasn't kidnapped."

Khreisheh himself paid tribute to parliament staff and a Fatah official for preventing his abduction.

He told Al-Arabiya television that masked gunmen had tried to assault him after he told them that only the Palestinian flag should fly over the parliament building in the central West Bank town of Ramallah.

"Staff from the Palestinian Legislative Council then intervened and a Fatah official condemned what was happening."

Fighters loosely linked to the Fatah party of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas ransacked dozens of offices linked to the rival Hamas movement in the West Bank on Saturday, in apparent revenge attacks after the Islamists seized power in the Gaza Strip.

Members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades destroyed offices at an Islamic school, a cultural centre, charities, local television and local radio in the city of Nablus, witnesses and Hamas said.

It was the latest in a spate of incidents of vandalism in the West Bank, a Fatah stronghold, against the targets of Hamas, the Islamist movement whose fighters overran pro-Fatah security forces in the Gaza Strip this week.

The assault on parliament was one of a rash attacks on Hamas targets across the West Bank carried out in apparent retaliation for the ransacking of Fatah offices and homes in the Gaza Strip since the Islamists seized the territory on Thursday night.

Militants of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades destroyed offices at an Islamic school, a cultural centre, charities, local television and local radio in the city of Nablus, witnesses and Hamas said.

Over the past few days, offices and stores linked with the Hamas have been torched and ransacked across the occupied West Bank.

But most of the movement's top leaders in the territory are in Israeli custody beyond the reach of Fatah loyalists.