Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas gave Fatah and Hamas a deadline on Thursday to end their deadly rivalry or else he would call a referendum, which could lead to a new national-unity government.
Abbas’s shock announcement came on the first day of cross-party talks aimed at drawing a line under divisions between his Fatah movement and the Islamists of Hamas, who now head the government after winning a January election.
The so-called national dialogue in Ramallah was called in the face of an upsurge in violence between Fatah and Hamas that has left 10 people dead since the beginning of the month.
As widely expected, both Abbas and Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya urged the armed groups to stop turning their guns on each other and avoid a descent into civil war.
But Abbas’s warning that they had 10 days to agree on a common platform or he would submit to a referendum a proposal from jailed faction leaders on how to end the Palestinian crisis caught everyone off guard.
”If not, I will submit the document to a referendum in 40 days,” he said.
The initiative drawn up by the jailed faction leaders and made public on May 10 sets out ways to ”preserve Palestinian unity” while reiterating ”the right of the Palestinian people to independence”.
The blueprint proposes that activities be ”confined to the territories occupied in 1967” — which could signal an end to attacks inside Israel — and suggests the creation of a national-unity government.
It also calls for an independent state in territory occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.
In an initial reaction from Hamas, its speaker in Parliament, Aziz Dweik, said that ”we accept the right of the Palestinian to determine their fate and they should have their say on this crucial question”.
A survey by the Ramallah-based Near East Consulting group released on Thursday showed 80% of Palestinians support the prisoners’ agreement.
The same survey also revealed that only a narrow majority believes civil war is likely to be avoided, given the mounting tensions between the factions.
Abbas began his speech with an appeal for all sides ”not to resort to arms because Palestinian blood is sacred”.
For his part, Haniya said that ”civil war is not in our vocabulary”.
The tension between the two factions has been mounting steadily since Hamas thrashed Fatah in January’s election.
Much of the rivalry has been centred on control of the security services, which remain the remit of Abbas as president of the Palestinian Authority.
Hamas has rolled out its own rival paramilitary force on the streets of the Gaza Strip, where the two sides have engaged in deadly gun battles.
The new force, which was explicitly vetoed by Abbas, has further exacerbated tensions while the regular security services, like all government employees, have gone unpaid since February.
European Union and United States decisions to freeze aid to the Palestinian Authority over Hamas’s failure to renounce violence and recognise Israel has further fuelled an economic crisis sparked by the Jewish state’s decision to stop handing over customs duties, worth about $60-million a month.
Israel, which has cut off all contacts with the Palestinian Authority, is threatening to unilaterally redraw the map of the Middle East — an idea which received qualified support this week from US President George Bush.
Haniya said it was vital the Palestinians remained united in the face of what he called a ”siege and conspiracy” from the West and Israel.
”Unfortunately, various Western countries, led by the US, have imposed a siege and political boycott on us and blocked the transfer of funds, as well as threatening the banks into starving the Palestinian people,” said Haniya, who spoke by videolink from Gaza due to Israeli travel restrictions.
Abbas, however, rebuffed talk of a conspiracy, saying it should not be used as a pretext to avoid addressing the roots of the current crisis.
”I do not support this conspiracy theory. Anyone who wants to get rid of a problem says it is a conspiracy, a Zionist conspiracy, just as a pretext to do nothing, which allows them to ignore the basic problem,” he said. — AFP
