Abbas’s Fatah: Agreement reached with Hamas on elections

Previous agreements between Fatah and Hamas failed to materialize due to the continued power struggle between the two sides.

By KHALED ABU TOAMEH
Senior Fatah official Azzam Al-Ahmed (2nd L), head of the Hamas government Ismail Haniyeh (3rd L) and senior Hamas leader Moussa Abu Marzouq (4th L) , hold their hands after announcing a reconciliation agreement in Gaza City April 23, 2014. The Gaza-based Islamist group Hamas and President Mahmoud A (photo credit: SUHAIB SALEM / REUTERS)
Senior Fatah official Azzam Al-Ahmed (2nd L), head of the Hamas government Ismail Haniyeh (3rd L) and senior Hamas leader Moussa Abu Marzouq (4th L) , hold their hands after announcing a reconciliation agreement in Gaza City April 23, 2014. The Gaza-based Islamist group Hamas and President Mahmoud A
(photo credit: SUHAIB SALEM / REUTERS)
Fatah and Hamas have reached an agreement to hold elections on the basis of proportional representation, Fatah Central Committee secretary-general 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 leaders of all factions to meet within a week “to agree on mechanisms to continue the process of 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.
“Building national unity is a strategic goal of the agreement, and our path is elections, and the democratic process is the only way to build our political system,” Rajoub said.
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 statement did not mention any agreement on holding long-overdue elections for the PA presidency and the PLC, which has 132 members.
The last presidential election was held in 2005, while the last parliamentary election was held in 2006.
Half of the PLC members are elected via national lists of the parties according to the system of proportional representation. The other half is elected in the different electoral districts according to the principle of majority vote. These members are not elected according to party lists and run as individual candidates.
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.


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