A Palestinian factions’ Egyptian-mediated truce got off to a shaky start on Monday as shootings continued, including an attack on a Hamas minister’s office.
Heavy fighting, in which six men were killed and dozens wounded since Saturday, casts further doubt on the future of a three-month-old Palestinian coalition formed by the governing Islamists of Hamas with President Mahmoud Abbas’s secular Fatah movement.
“The ceasefire is limping on crutches and is in danger of collapsing if violations on both sides do not stop,” an official involved in the truce negotiations told Reuters.
Shortly after the ceasefire took effect at 11 am (8:00 GMT),  gunmen sprayed bullets at the office of Sports Minister Bassem Naim of Hamas, who is a close associate of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, an aide to the minister said. Naim was escorted away unharmed, the aide, Ahmed Mhessen, said.
He said the gunmen were from the Fatah faction and that they “opened direct fire” in what he called an assassination attempt.
But a Fatah official denied any attack against the minister. He accused Hamas of “lies and fabrications”. He added: “It is Hamas gunmen who are shooting everywhere in Gaza.”
It was the first attack on a member of the unity government since Haniyeh brought in members of Fatah in March in a bid to end a cycle of internal bloodletting and ease international sanctions imposed after the Hamas was voted into power last year.
Gunmen had earlier fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a police station within minutes of the truce, and militants from both camps continued to block key Gaza intersections with checkpoints, in violation of the deal.

Matriculation exam
A key motive behind the new truce was to permit 70,000 high school students in Gaza and the occupied West Bank to take their matriculation exams peacefully.  “These clashes were regrettable and harmful,” Abbas said at a high school in the West Bank town of Ramallah where the exams were getting under way. 
The tests began on schedule in Gaza, but most pupils took circuitous routes to their schools in a bid to avoid the gunmen.
 Musbah Abu al-Kheir, 17, passed several armed checkpoints on his way to school from a refugee camp.