RAMALLAH: Palestinian Premier Rami Hamdallah is to head the consensus government to be formed under a deal with Hamas to end seven years of rival administrations in the West Bank and Gaza, an official said yesterday.
“The government is nearly ready, and Rami Hamdallah will be prime minister,” the official close to the reconciliation negotiations told AFP on condition of anonymity. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas “informed Mr Hamdallah yesterday (Wednesday) that he would head the government,” the official said.
Hamdallah is the prime minister of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority. Hamas has a rival prime minister in Gaza — Ismail Haniya. Hamas “had no objection” to the decision, said Bassem Naim, an adviser to Haniya.
A senior Fatah official, Azzam Al Ahmed, is due in Gaza on Sunday to “finalise consultations” on the government, Naim said.
On April 23, Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, dominated by Abbas’s Fatah party, signed a surprise reconciliation deal aimed at forging a unified administration.
Under the deal, the two sides were to form an “independent government” of technocrats, headed by Abbas, paving the way for long-delayed elections.
Hamas, which does not recognise Israel, has ruled Gaza since it expelled Fatah after a week of deadly clashes in 2007. The April reconciliation agreement incensed Israel, putting the final nail in the coffin of faltering US-led peace talks. The new government will still need the approval of the Hamas-dominated Palestinian parliament, which was elected in 2006 before the deadly fighting of the following year, Haniya said last week.
Both the European Union and the United States have said repeatedly that they will have no dealings with any government that involves Hamas until the Islamist group renounces violence and recognises Israel and past peace agreements.
Meanwhile, exiled former Palestinian security chief Mohammed Dahlan says his conviction for defamation by a West Bank court is aimed at keeping him from running in promised presidential and parliamentary elections.
Dahlan, who lives in exile in the United Arab Emirates, was convicted in absentia by a Ramallah court in March and sentenced to two years in prison, but the ruling was only made public this week.
Writing in Arabic on his Facebook page late on Wednesday, Dahlan said the timing “obviously aims to disrupt... my resolved participation in the next presidential and parliamentary elections”.
Dahlan, a bitter rival of Abbas, accused the president of using the court “as a tool to serve his personal grudges and purposes against me”. If the sentence is upheld on appeal, it would bar Dahlan from standing as a candidate.
Once a leading light in Fatah, Dahlan once held the internal security portfolio and was head of the powerful security forces in the Gaza Strip. He fell from grace in June 2007 after the humiliating rout of his forces by Hamas during days of fierce street battles in Gaza, which saw the Islamist group eject Fatah from the territory.
In 2011, his immunity as a member of the Palestinian parliament was lifted and he was expelled from Fatah over allegations of financial corruption and murder. Abbas and Dahlan have both accused each other of complicity in the mysterious death of president Yasser Arafat in November 2004.
AFP
