Palestine, October 17: The Islamist movement Hamas is about to hand its response on to Egyptians mediating a Palestinian unity deal, a spokesman said without tipping his hand on what it would say.
A Hamas delegation will travel to Cairo tomorrow, Fawzi Barhoum told AFP, while refusing to say whether the movement would accept the proposal.
The response “will be taken within a framework aimed at guaranteeing the success of the Egyptian efforts” to heal the deep rift between Hamas and the secular Fatah movement, Mr Barhoum said.
Yesterday, Cairo announced that its mediators had delayed to an unspecified date their deadline for Hamas to sign the unity deal at the Islamists’ request. That came a day after Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas’s Fatah party presented a signed copy of the deal, which marks Cairo’s latest bid to unite the bitter rivals.
In the meanwhile, Mr Abbas said that he would announce the date for the Palestinian elections on October 25. The embattled Palestinian president said earlier this week that if the two factions did not reach agreement he would call for elections on January 24 instead of the June 28 date in the Cairo plan.
Palestinian Basic Law mandates that a new general election be called at least three months before the end of the sitting parliament’s mandate, a deadline which falls on October 25.
Mr Abbas’s four-year term as president expired last January, but Fatah has cited provisions in the constitution that require presidential and parliamentary elections to be held together to justify his remaining in office.
Cairo has struggled for months to get Fatah and Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, to sign a national unity deal, but the two main Palestinian factions have repeatedly postponed the signing.
Egypt announced last week that the rival factions would sign the much delayed unity deal in Cairo on October 25-26, but Hamas asked for a delay amid controversy over a damning UN report on the Gaza war at the turn of the year.
The Islamist movement had accused Fatah of “betraying” the Palestinian victims of the conflict after the Palestinian delegation at the UN Human Rights Council agreed to have a vote on the report deferred.
But in another session yesterday, the council voted to endorse the report. Israel slammed that as “unjust”, saying the report hurts Middle East peace efforts and encourages “terrorist organisations worldwide”.
Both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas approved the move.
The Cairo-brokered agreement would also see Hamas and Fatah release political prisoners and reform security services with Egyptian and Arab oversight.
Hamas-Fatah tensions date back to the start of limited Palestinian self-rule in the mid-1990s when Fatah strongmen cracked down on Islamist activists. They worsened in January 2006, when in a surprise general election rout, Hamas beat the previously dominant Fatah to grab more than half the seats in parliament.
Hamas expelled Fatah from Gaza after a week of deadly clashes in June 2007, cleaving the Palestinian territories into rival hostile camps. ]]
—Agencies