Palestinian Fatah faction mulls reconciliation with Hamas

During a Saturday evening meeting headed by the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, which came amid the persisting unrest in the Israeli-occupied territories of the West Bank, “Fatah’s internal situation” as well as a potential reconciliation with the Gaza-based Hamas resistance group was debated, said Abbas’s spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh as cited in a Ma’an News Agency report.
 
Fatah central committee member Amal Hamad told the local Mawtini radio station earlier in the day that various Fatah factions “were striving towards more responsibility.”
 
“There is a real invitation for the Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements to form a serious national partnership,” Hamad added.
 
Relations between Hamas and Fatah have remained tense after a joint national consensus government was dissolved last June, just a year after it was initially established.
 
The two key rival factions have had particularly tense relations since Hamas scored a major victory in Palestinian legislative elections in 2006 and emerged the ruling party in the Israeli-besieged Gaza Strip, also triggering Israeli ire and alarm.
 
The aim of the international conference should be to end the Israeli occupation and establish an independent Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, Abbas's spokesman cited him as saying.