GAZA CITY: Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas supremo Khaled Meshaal will Tuesday hold crunch talks in a bid to broker an elusive national unity deal and end fighting that has killed 63 people.
On the eve of the talks, a shaky ceasefire between Abbas s Fatah faction and the warring Hamas was taking a tentative hold in the Gaza Strip where guns, mortars and grenades are silent almost for the first time since Jan. 25.
The last 10 days has been marked by the deadliest intra-Palestinian violence in the Gaza Strip since Hamas won a massive parliamentary election in January 2006, thrashing the secular Fatah and limiting its power to the presidency.
Tuesday s crisis summit hosted by Saudi King Abdullah in Mecca will seek to overcome deep seated differences between the two factions on finding a power-sharing agreement.
Negotiators have tried but failed for months to find common ground on the key issues of relations with Israel and the dividing up of portfolios in a national unity government uniting Hamas and Fatah around the same cabinet table.
The Hamas-led government, run by current Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, has for months refused enormous pressure to recognize Israel and abide by peace agreements between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel.
An ensuing political and aid boycott from the main sponsors of the stalled Middle East peace process, the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States, has unleashed an unprecedented Palestinian economic crisis.
We must reach an agreement based on the political program of the PLO. The government must respect this program as well as past agreements, to allow us to end the blockade and shift the Palestinian cause out of impasse, said Fatah official, Abbas al-Ahmed, who will accompany the president to Mecca.
We must take the ground from under Israel s feet which pretends there is no Palestinian partner to negotiate with, he added.
Meshaal has also stressed that the Mecca talks could not fail.
I say to Fatah that it is forbidden to fail. Only dialogue can settle political disagreements, he told a news conference in Damascus on Sunday.
We want a true partnership between Fatah and Hamas. We are in the same boat. There is no other way to strengthen national unity, he added.
Haniya, Abbas s nemesis will also attend Tuesday s talks.
The summit will be a second rare meeting for the Palestinian president and exiled Hamas political leader after talks in Syria on Jan. 21 ended without a breakthrough.
Just four days after the last Abbas-Meshaal meeting, a fresh round of violence broke out in which 63 people have since died in the Gaza Strip as both factions blamed each other for the increasingly deadly fighting.
