Fatah, Hamas reach election deal
Fatah and Hamas have reached an agreement to hold elections on the basis of proportional representation, Fatah Central Committee secretarygeneral Jibril Rajoub said Thursday.
The two parties were now awaiting an invitation from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to call Palestinian factions to issue a presidential decree that would set a date for the proposed elections, he told the PA’s Palestine TV.
Rajoub held talks in Turkey with Hamas officials over the past two days.
Previous agreements between Fatah and Hamas failed to materialize due to their ongoing power struggle.
Rajoub said the Fatah delegation he headed in the discussions with Hamas “conducted an intense national strategic dialogue” at the PA’s consulate in Istanbul. The meeting also aimed at ending the Hamas- Fatah rift and paving the way for achieving national reconciliation between the two parties, he said.
The Hamas delegation was headed by Saleh Arouri, deputy head of Hamas’s “political bureau.”
“We reached a clear vision of the mechanisms for building national partnership through proportional- representation elections,” Rajoub said. They will be held in three separate phases for the Palestine Legislative Council ( PLC), the PA presidency and the Palestine National Council ( the legislative body of the PLO), he added.
Rajoub called on faction leaders to meet within a week “to agree on mechanisms to continue building the national partnership to confront the ‘ Deal of the Century,’ annexation and normalization.”
The “Deal of the Century” refers to US President Donald Trump’s vision for resolving the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. “Annexation” refers to Israel’s intention to apply its sovereignty to portions of the West Bank. “Normalization” refers to recent peace treaties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
In a joint statement, Fatah and Hamas said they had agreed on a “vision that would promote national partnership among all Palestinian factions.”
The two groups pledged to work together to “defend the rights and interests of our people and to confront all conspiracies until the achievement of full independence represented by the independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.”
The last presidential election was held in 2005, while the last parliamentary election was held in 2006.
The Fatah delegation was scheduled to head to Doha and Cairo later on Thursday to brief Qatari and Egyptian officials on the outcome of the talks in Turkey.