Abbas threatens, Hamas rejects early Palestinian poll (2nd Roundup)

Nov 24, 2008, 13:18 GMT

Gaza/Ramallah - The power struggle between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas entered into higher gear Monday, after Abbas threatened to call early elections, a move the radical Islamist movement said it would not accept.

Senior Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar said Abbas, of the secular Fatah movement, lacked the authority to call early parliamentary elections without the approval of the Hamas-dominated legislature.

'This will not happen as long as our leaders are in Israel's custody and in the West Bank,' he told a news conference at his Gaza residence.

Al-Zahar was responding to Abbas' statement to the Central Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Ramallah late Sunday, in which he said he would call simultaneous presidential and parliamentary elections in the beginning of next year, if attempts to reconcile between him and Hamas failed.

The PLO body, opening a two-day session in the West Bank city of Ramallah Sunday, appointed the 73-year-old Palestinian leader as 'president of the state of Palestine,' a move aimed at bolstering Abbas, whose term as president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), the body which governs the Palestinian autonomous areas, expires January 9.

The power struggle first rose its head when Hamas unexpectedly beat Abbas' Fatah party in January 2006 democratic parliamentary elections, one year after he himself was elected in a separate presidential poll on a pro-peace platform that contradicted that of the Islamic group, which refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist.

The struggle culminated in Hamas forcibly seizing sole control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, after leading a short-lived unity government with Fatah.

'We care for dialogue (with Hamas) and we will exert all efforts to make it succeed. Otherwise , I will issue a decree for starting [simultaneous] presidential and legislative elections by 2009 based on complete proportional representation,' said Abbas, who hopes to get Arab backing for his position at Wednesday's meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Cairo, to which Hamas has until now not been invited.

Some 126 members of the PLO Central Council convened in Ramallah for two days to discuss the internal Palestinian standoff. They overwhelmingly voted in favour of the move to appoint Abbas president of Palestine, with only one member opposing.

Even though a Palestinian state does not yet exist, the PLO had elected Yasser Arafat as its president in 1989, following a unilateral declaration of independence made from exile in Algiers a year earlier.

The post had remained vacant since Arafat's death in November 2004. Abbas' nomination as his replacement is timed as a way out the legal end of his term as PA president in January. While Hamas has threatened it will no longer recognize his authority, Abbas could now claim he can continue to rule under his second, symbolic title.

He wants Hamas to agree to hold simultaneous parliamentary and legislative elections before the parliament's four-year term ends in January 2010.

Israeli government officials meanwhile cited intelligence information that Hamas was interested in restoring its informal, Egyptian-brokered truce with Israel, which had held for five months, prior to recent violence.

But the attacks have become more sporadic since Thursday. Militants fired one rocket from Gaza at a southern Israeli kibbutz (agricultural commune) on Sunday afternoon, an Israeli military spokesman said.

On Monday Israel opened its border with the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip to allow in some 45 trucks with basic food and medical supplies as well as a limited amount of industrial diesel.

The shipment was the second during 20 days of near-total closure of the strip, and followed a reduction in rocket attacks from the salient over the last few days.

The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), Karen Abu Zayd, had warned Sunday that Gaza might suffer hunger if Israel did not allow humanitarian aid into the strip.

International media organizations also petitioned the supreme court in Jerusalem Monday against Israel's denial of access to the Gaza Strip to foreign journalists for the past two weeks.

The entry ban is part of Israel's policy to allow in only essential humanitarian supplies so long as rocket attacks continue, but the Foreign Press Association (FPA) representing foreign reporters in Israel and the Palestinian areas has strongly protested this as 'unprecedented.'