Israeli soldiers detaining a  protester during a  demonstration in support of Palestinian prisoners on Road 60, which links Jerusalem and Hebron.

AFP

Gaza City

 

A new Palestinian “consensus government” to be named by the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the Hamas movement is to be finalised within days, a senior Hamas official said yesterday.

Bassem Naim, an advisor to Hamas’s premier for the Gaza Strip, Ismail Haniya, said a senior member of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement, which dominates the PLO, would meet with Hamas officials in Gaza this week to conclude negotiations.

Azzam al-Ahmed is “arriving in Gaza on Wednesday and Thursday to meet with the Hamas reconciliation delegation to hold consultations”, Naim told AFP.

“We expect the government to be announced by (Abbas) early the following week,” he said, and will then be presented to the Palestinian parliament for a vote of confidence.

Hamas signed a reconciliation deal last month with the PLO in a surprise move which aims to overcome a years-long intra-Palestinian split.

Hamas has dominated the Palestinian parliament since winning a landslide victory in the last parliamentary election, held in 2006.

But the US and Europe have since backed the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority under Abbas and boycotted the Hamas movement.

Under their April 23 reconciliation deal, the two sides are to form an “independent government” of technocrats, headed by Abbas, paving the way for long-delayed elections.

Representatives from the rival factions have held several rounds of talks to heal the bad blood since Hamas expelled Fatah from Gaza in a week of deadly clashes in 2007.

The deal has incensed Israel, putting the final nail in the coffin of faltering US-led peace talks between the Jewish state and Abbas’s administration.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian leadership has started “seriously studying” severing security ties and co-ordination with Israel, according to a senior security official said in Ramallah.

General Adnan Damiri, spokesman of the Palestinian security apparatus in the West Bank, said it was suggested by a committee formed to study security and political obligations imposed on the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) in accordance with the Oslo peace accords signed in 1993.

“The current and previous security co-ordination with Israel was an outcome of political agreements and treaties that now need to be previewed and reconsidered,” said Damiri, according to Xinhua news agency.