RAMALLAH: The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) yesterday said that the Egyptian-sponsored Palestinian unity reconciliation talks may not resume as scheduled later this month.
Rabah Mhana, a senior PFLP leader in Gaza Strip, said that “holding a new round of the dialogue on April 6 is not confirmed, this date was given to ease the shock that followed the failure of the third round.”
He, however, stressed that in general, the dialogue did not fail and would likely postpone “because the outstanding issues are not yet solved.”
The talks mainly aim at reconciling rival Fatah and Hamas movements by integrating them into a united political regime demonstrating the results of the 2006 parliamentary elections which Hamas won.
Since the dialogue launched in early March, the factions agreed on forming a unity government replacing Hamas’ de facto government in Gaza and the West-backed government that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas formed in the West Bank after his forces lost control of the Gaza Strip in 2007.
However, Hamas and Fatah failed to agree on the political platform of the government since the Islamic movement says it cannot join or accept any government that recognizes Israel or the interim peace deals singed between Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel.
Mhana held that three trends were seen in the process of the dialogue: a Fatah-backed one which calls for adopting the peace accords with Israel in the platform of the government; a Hamas-proposed one which “wants to get the biggest share of the authority’s cake without in exchange for the minimum concessions; the third one calls for reaching an agreement without any form of concession.”
For his part, Hamas spokesman Mushier Al-Masri said that the demands to recognize Israel and previous peace deals have prevented his movement and Fatah from striking a national reconciliation agreement.
Meanwhile, Middle East envoy Tony Blair urged Israel’s prime minister yesterday to resume Palestinian statehood talks in parallel with a push to boost the West Bank economy and to let Palestinians control more of their territory. Blair met extreme rightist Benjamin Netanyahu laying out in broad terms how the “Quartet” of Middle East mediators — the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations — wants to see stalled peacemaking proceed.
“There is a great deal of skepticism out there,” Blair told reporters after talks with Netanyahu. Tasked by the Quartet with spearheading economic development in the occupied West Bank, Blair said providing Palestinians with greater freedom of movement was central to creating the foundations for statehood.
But the former British prime minister said he told Netanyahu that a “credible political negotiation for a two-state solution” should be conducted “in parallel” with that.
Marc Otte, the European Union’s Middle East envoy, concurred: “You cannot change things on the ground without having a political perspective on what it is that we’re doing.”
Netanyahu has been vague about renewing talks over thorny territorial issues, saying his priority was to focus instead on the creation of development zones and on ways to ease roadblocks and checkpoints that inhibit travel and trade in the West Bank.
Last week, Netanyahu’s foreign minister, ultranationalist Avigdor Lieberman, declared that negotiations over statehood borders, and the fate of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees, launched at a US-sponsored conference in Annapolis, Maryland in November 2007, had “no validity.”
— With input from agencies
