CAIRO – Palestinian leaders formally ended a four-year rift between secular Fatah and the Islamist Hamas at a ceremony in Egypt yesterday, a reconciliation the faction’s supporters see as crucial for their drive to set up an independent state.
Israel, which in 1967 captured the territories – the West Bank and Gaza Strip – where Palestinians seek statehood, said the deal was a blow to prospects for peace.
“We announce to Palestinians that we turn forever the black page of division,” Palestinian president and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas said in his opening address.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on a visit to London: “What happened today in Cairo is a tremendous blow to peace and a great victory for terrorism.”
However, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal challenged Israel to peace, offering to work with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and Egypt on a new strategy to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict.In Cairo Mr Meshaal said he did not believe Israel was ready for peace with any Palestinians.
“We have given peace since Madrid till now 20 years and I say we are ready to agree among us Palestinians and with Arab support to give an additional chance,” Mr Meshaal said, referring to the 1991 international Middle East peace conference that launched Israeli-Arab peace talks. “But, dear brothers, because Israel does not respect us, and because Israel has rejected all our initiatives and . . . rejects Palestinian rights, rejects Fatah members as well as Hamas . . . it wants the land, security and claims to want peace.”
Against expectations, neither Mr Abbas nor Mr Meshaal signed the unity document, Hamas leaders will meet Mr Abbas next week, possibly in Cairo, to start work on implementing the accord.
Mr Meshaal said Hamas sought a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza devoid of any Israeli settlers and without “giving up a single inch of land” or the right of return of Palestinian refugees.
Israel withdrew soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005. It has kept up settlement activity in the much larger West Bank.
Hamas has stated in the past that it would accept an interim solution in the form of a state in all of the territory Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
The unity deal calls for forming an interim government to run the Fatah-controlled West Bank and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. The agreement also calls for elections within a year.
Mr Abbas repeated his call for a halt to Jewish settlement construction as a precondition for resuming talks with Israel.
“The state of Palestine must be born this year,” Mr Abbas said. He is widely expected, in the absence of peace talks, to ask the UN in September to recognise a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
Israel and the United States oppose such a unilateral move.
Palestinians see reconciliation as a key step towards presenting a common front at the UN but the deal presents potential diplomatic problems for Mr Abbas’s aid-dependent Palestinian Authority. Much of the West shuns Hamas over its refusal to recognise Israel, renounce violence and accept interim Israeli-Palestinian peace agreements.