Palestinian deal ‘a blow to prospects for peace’

PALESTINIAN leaders formally ended a four-year rift between secular Fatah and the Islamist Hamas at a ceremony in Egypt, a reconciliation their people 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 the Palestinians seek statehood, decried the deal as a blow to prospects for peace.

“We announce to Palestinians that we turn forever the black page of division,” Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah’s leader, said in his opening address.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said during a visit to London: “What happened today in Cairo is a tremendous blow to peace and a great victory for terrorism.”

Hamas, whose founding charter calls for Israel’s destruction, seized the Gaza Strip from Fatah forces in a brief Palestinian civil war in 2007. It has opposed Abbas’s quest for a negotiated peace with the Jewish state.

In what appeared a sign of lingering friction, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal did not share the podium with Abbas and the ceremony was delayed briefly over where he would sit. Against expectations, neither signed the unity document.

It is expected that Hamas leaders will meet Abbas next week to start work on implementing the accord.

In his speech to the gathering, 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, but kept up settlement activity in the much larger West Bank.

In the past, Hamas said it would accept an interim solution of a state of all the territory Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war, along with a long-term ceasefire.

The deal calls for forming an interim government to run the West Bank, where Abbas is based, and the Gaza Strip, and prepare for parliamentary and presidential elections within a year.

In his speech, Abbas repeated his call for a halt to Jewish settlement construction as a condition for resuming peace talks with Israel that began in September but fizzled out within weeks after it refused to extend a limited building moratorium.

“The state of Palestine must be born this year,” he said.

Abbas is widely expected, in the absence of peace talks, to ask the UN General Assembly in September to recognise a Palestinian state in all of the West Bank and Gaza. Israel and the United States oppose such a unilateral move.

Palestinians view reconciliation as an essential step toward presenting a common front at the United Nations and a reflection of a deep-seated public desire to end the internal schism amid popular revolts that have swept the Arab world.

But the deal presents potential diplomatic problems for 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 deals.