Salah Al-Bardawil, a Gaza-based Hamas leader, said that his movement made a condition during national reconciliation talks with the rival Fatah movement that it will only agree to hold presidential and parliamentary elections if voting takes place in East Jerusalem the way they are conducted in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with the participation of Hamas.

A top Israeli official told the Israeli daily Haaretz that Israel was unlikely to allow voting in occupied East Jerusalem if Hamas participated. Israel considers Hamas a terrorist organization.

Al-Bardawil said that "it is the right of the Palestinian people to hold elections in East Jerusalem which is the capital of their state."

He added that preventing the Palestinians from holding elections in the city is "tantamount to Israeli blackmail that aims at torpedoing the national reconciliation deal."

In 2006, Israel arrested four Hamas legislators in Jerusalem — Ahmed Atoun, Mohammed Abu Teir, Khaled Abu Arafeh and Mohammed Toutah — for their connections to the movement.

It had warned the four Hamas legislators to renounce membership of Hamas or risk losing residency rights in East Jerusalem. Israel decided to expel Abu Teir and Atoun after they rejected the Israeli condition. Arafeh and Toutah has taken refuge at the International Committee of the Red Cross compound in East Jerusalem since 2010.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas Politburo chief Khaled Meshaal met in Cairo late last month to discuss the implemention of the national reconciliation deal in a bid to end a Palestinian rift. The agreement aims to restore political unity between the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and the Fatah-ruled West Bank.

In December, Palestinian factions will meet in Cairo to continue talks on restoring political unity between Gaza and the West Bank through a transitional government preparing for elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Abbas' commitment to retain caretaker Prime Minister Salam Fayyad as his candidate to head the interim unity government blocked the implementation of the reconciliation deal. Hamas fiercely objects to having Fayyad serve in the transition government as it holds him partly responsible for the Palestinian split.

Abbas fears that failure to appoint Fayyad would prompt the US and EU to suspend financial aid to the Palestinians. The West sees Hamas as a terrorist organization.