Hamas threatened on Friday to boycott next week’s Palestinian reconciliation talks, accusing president Mahmoud Abbas of arresting hundreds of members of the Islamist movement.
”We will not go to the Palestinian dialogue as long as this massacre against Hamas continues in the West Bank,” Hamas MP Mushar al Masri told a crowd in the northern Gaza Strip city of Jabaliya.
He said Hamas would decide later on Friday whether to take part in the talks scheduled to start in Cairo on Monday.
He accused Abbas, who also leads the Fatah movement, of arresting hundreds of Hamas members in the West Bank to please Israel and the United States.
”If you persist with your injustice and your repression, Hamas and the people of the West Bank will trample you,” Masri shouted.
The two factions have been bitterly divided since Hamas violently seized power in Gaza in June 2007, confining Abbas’s rule to the Israeli-occupied West Bank and cleaving Palestinians into two hostile camps.
Representatives from all major Palestinian political movements have been invited to Cairo to discuss the reconciliation plan, which has been welcomed by Fatah and 11 other factions.
Hamas expressed reservations about the plan, which calls for a politically independent transitional government to pave the way for new elections, saying Abbas would get an automatic extension of a term the Islamists insist ends in January.
”The 9th of January at midnight and one minute, the Palestinian people will no longer have a president called Mahmoud Abbas,” said Masri.
Abbas insisted his law-enforcement forces arrested people who posed a security risk irrespective of political affiliation. ”They are arrested and brought to justice,” he said at a joint news conference Friday with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the West Bank city of Ramallah. — AFP
