Palestinian reconciliation meetings are due to take place after
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's return from the United
Nations, Senior Hamas official Ahmad Yousef told Palestinian news agency Ma'an on Friday.
Yousef said that Egypt
will ask the Palestinians to resume dialogue over Palestinian
reconciliation.
According to Ma'an, Yousef stressed that
reconciliation would be a top priority of the Hamas movement in the
coming months, after Abbas's statehood bid, set to take place at the UN
on November 29.
Yousef said that until then, the PA president
would invest all his efforts in the statehood bid, for which he
expressed full support, wishing Abbas success.
Yousef's backing of the statehood bid conflicts with remarks made by Hamas government spokesman Taher a-Nunu a day earlier, denying reports that the movement's prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh had expressed support for the move.
The
denial came shortly after Abbas’s office announced that he had received
a phone call from Haniyeh and top Hamas official Ahmed Bahr, who
expressed their support for the statehood bid. Abbas’s office said that
Islamic Jihad leader Mohamed Hindi also phoned the PA president to voice
his backing for the statehood bid.
A-Nunu said that the claim that Hamas supported the statehood bid was “untrue.”
An Islamic Jihad official in the Gaza Strip also denied that his group backed Abbas’s statehood bid.
Abbas on Wednesday rejected US Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton’s request to refrain from asking the UN to upgrade the
status of a Palestinian state to non-member.
Abbas relayed his position to
Clinton during a meeting in Ramallah.
At the meeting, Clinton reiterated
Washington’s opposition to Abbas’s statehood bid, chief PLO negotiator Saeb
Erekat said.
“President Abbas told Clinton that we have taken a decision
[to go to the UN],” Erekat said. “We are not interested in a confrontation with
the US or any other country. We are practicing our right to establish a
Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, with east Jerusalem as its
capital.This will happen on November 29.”
Khaled Abu Toameh contributed to this report