GAZA, 24 March 2005 — Two leftist Palestinian militant groups said yesterday they would compete for the first time in a parliamentary election in July after boycotting the last vote in opposition to an interim peace deal with Israel. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine linked their decision to Cairo talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, at which factions extended a de facto truce with Israel.
The largest militant faction, Hamas, an Islamic group sworn to Israel’s destruction, said this month that it would contest the parliamentary election for the first time, a move that could threaten the longtime dominance of Abbas’ Fatah movement.
The militant groups, behind a series of shooting attacks and suicide bombings in Israel during a 4-1/2-year-old Palestinian uprising, rejected the 1993 Oslo Accords which gave Palestinians a measure of self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza.
PFLP leader Rabah Muhana said his group changed its stance because the Cairo talks made clear the Palestinian goal of achieving statehood and promised reform of election procedures. He said parliamentary representation could better enable his group to press for democratic change and an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which it captured in the 1967 Middle East War.
Ramzi Rabah, a DFLP leader, said his group had changed its strategy in view of world backing for Palestinian statehood. “The situation has changed from Oslo. The whole world is now convinced that for peace and stability to prevail in the Middle East, a Palestinian independent state must be established,” Rabah said.
Abbas’ mainstream Fatah faction won 66 seats in the 88-member Parliament in the first Palestinian election in 1996, which was boycotted by groups that rejected the Oslo accords. The PFLP and DFLP together command less than five percent support among Palestinians, polls show. Hamas has the backing of a quarter to a third of Palestinians.
Islamic Jihad, a smaller militant group that also denies Israel’s right to exist, has yet to decide whether to contest the election. Abbas, a moderate elected on a platform of nonviolence to succeed the late Yasser Arafat, conducted the talks in Cairo this month that led to an agreement for continued calm, seen as a key step towards renewing peace talks with Israel.
Meanwhile, Israel yesterday banned the entry of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza during the Jewish state’s Purim holiday celebrations this week. The five-day ban that lasts through Sunday night means some 10,500 Palestinians who have permits to work in Israel will not be allowed out of the occupied territories.
Israel issued most of the work permits earlier in the year as a gesture to Abbas. “In accordance with a decision by the political echelon and in light of the security assessment, a general closure will be imposed on the West Bank and Gaza Strip,” an army statement said. It said humanitarian cases would be exempted from the ban.
Israel has routinely sealed off the Palestinian territories for major Jewish holidays, citing security needs during the Palestinian uprising. Palestinians have called the measure collective punishment.
In another development, an Israeli parliamentary committee yesterday approved a bill for a referendum on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to withdraw from Gaza later this year, sending the legislation to Parliament.
But political analysts say the bill backed by ultranationalists opposed to ceding an inch of occupied land has almost no chance of passing in the full legislature.
Some right-wing lawmakers have pushed for a nationwide ballot over Sharon’s objections in the hope it could delay or stop the evacuation of all 21 Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and four of 120 in the West Bank starting this July.
The legislation was approved by a parliamentary committee in a stormy session after an ultra-Orthodox rabbi, whose constituency includes ultrareligious settlers, ordered his party’s representative to vote in favor of the bill.
Meanwhile, the Jordanian government yesterday denied as “utterly baseless” Israeli press reports quoting King Abdallah as saying Syria, Lebanon’s Hezbollah militias and Iran represented “the greatest threats to stability in the Middle East”.
“The Israeli press reports are utterly baseless and totally untrue and have the primary aim of injuring Jordan’s image and its ties with Arab and Islamic countries,” Culture Minister and Government official spokesperson Asma Khader said. Israel’s newspapers Haaretz and Yedioth Ahronoth earlier yesterday also quoted Abdallah as telling US Jewish leaders during his current visit to the United States that the Jordanian authorities “had warned Israel of attacks plotted by Syria and Hezbollah”.
The two papers also alleged that the monarch had said Syria and Hezbollah were “encouraging Palestinian militias to wage attacks against Israel” and that he had warned Sharon to probe those responsible for plotting attacks on the Jewish state.
