Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas on Wednesday insisted there would be no dialogue with Hamas until the Islamists return Gaza to his legitimate authority after seizing the territory in June.
“What Hamas did was a destructive operation which helped those who don’t want to see an independent Palestinian state,” Abbas told journalists after talks with Eygptian President Hosni Mubarak in the Egyptian port of Alexandria.
“There is no dialogue with Hamas until they go back on what they did and return what they took,” he said, reiterating that he himself had been elected as the legitimate president of the Palestinian Authority.
“They know what they took and they know how to return it,” he said of Hamas, whose fighters ejected Abbas’ Fatah faction from the Gaza Strip on June 15.
Abbas’ words followed a similar declaration by Azzam al-Ahmad, the chief of Fatah’s parliamentary bloc, in the West Bank.
“To end the crisis, Hamas must end its putsch in the Gaza Strip and return this territory to the elected and legitimate president Mahmud Abbas,” Ahmad told AFP in Ramallah.
“Afterward, we will be able to sit down immediately and start a national dialogue,” he said.
Abbas fired Hamas premier Ismail Haniya and the rest of a unity cabinet after the Islamists’ takeover of Gaza. Hamas has refused to recognise the move and Haniya still considers himself the legitimate Palestinian premier.
However, Haniya on Tuesday said he was prepared to “give up” his post in order for the two warring parties to reconcile.
Abbas has repeatedly ruled out any talks with the movement that overran security forces loyal to him in the territory.
Israel, keen to support the moderate president in his standoff with the group whose charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state, has sealed off Gaza following the takeover, allowing in only basic humanitarian aid.
Several hundred Palestinians remain trapped in Egypt since the takeover.
While Israel has allowed many of the original 6,000 stranded Palestinians to go back to Gaza via the Jewish state, no Hamas supporters will do so, fearing arrest.
Instead, they await the reopening of the Rafah crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, the territory’s only international gateway that does not go via Israel.
The Alexandria talks follow Abbas’s meeting on Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in the West Bank city of Jericho. That was the first time in seven years that such a high-level meeting has taken place on Palestinian territory.
Abbas said he had also discussed with Mubarak a Middle East peace conference proposed by US President George W. Bush for later this year.
Expectations for the conference are low, as neither side can agree on how to proceed ahead of the meeting called in a bid to jumpstart peace talks which have been dormant for more than six years.
Abbas repeated the need for what he called “a real framework” for the creation of a Palestinian state to be discussed at the conference rather than the “declaration of principles” sought by Israel.
“That is something we do not want,” Abbas said. “We have a lot of declarations of principles.”
Israel has said it does not plan to enter talks on core issues on a Palestinian state, something the Palestinians are adamant should be on the table.
Front Page Features