"What Hamas did was a destructive operation which helped those who don't want to see an independent Palestinian state," Abbas told journalists after talks with Eygptian President Hosni Mubarak in the Egyptian port of Alexandria.

"There is no dialogue with Hamas until they go back on what they did and return what they took," he said, reiterating that he himself had been elected as the legitimate president of the Palestinian Authority.

"They know what they took and they know how to return it," he said of Hamas, whose fighters ejected Abbas' Fatah faction from the Gaza Strip on June 15.

Abbas' words followed a similar declaration by Azzam al-Ahmad, the chief of Fatah's parliamentary bloc, in the West Bank.

"To end the crisis, Hamas must end its putsch in the Gaza Strip and return this territory to the elected and legitimate president Mahmud Abbas," Ahmad told AFP in Ramallah.

Meanwhile, Israeli troops shot dead three Palestinian militants from the Islamist Hamas movement on Wednesday in separate incidents near Israel's border with the Gaza Strip, medics and the army said.

"Two armed men were identified several hundred metres (yards) from the security fence. A force opened fire at them and identified hitting them," an army spokesman told AFP.

Hamas identified the men as Saadi Arqayeq, 23, and Mohammed al-Batnizhi, 19, and said they were killed in exchanges of fire with Israeli troops on the outskirts of Gaza City.

Later in the day, the troops shot dead a member of Hamas's paramilitary group, whom the Islamists identified as 23-year-old Ikrami Abu Hamsha.

"The IDF (Israel Defence Forces) witnessed two armed men in northern Gaza, in the area of the security fence," a spokesman said. "The IDF fired at the men and identified hitting one."

Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip on June 15 after it overran Fatah forces loyal to moderate president Mahmud Abbas following a week of bloody street battles.

The latest deaths took to 5,809 the number of people killed since the start of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000, the vast majority of them Palestinian, according to an AFP count.