GAZA CITY: Hamas has delayed sending a delegation to Cairo to give its response to an Egyptian-proposed Palestinian reconciliation deal, a senior official in the Islamist group told AFP on Sunday.
The Hamas delegation was to travel to Cairo on Sunday, but Ayman Taha said the trip has been delayed indefinitely.
Hamas has postponed sending its delegation to Egypt because General Omar Suleiman is not in Cairo, he said, referring to the Egyptian intelligence chief who has been brokering efforts to reconcile Hamas with its secular Fatah rivals.
Communication between Egypt and Hamas continues, Taha said, without specifying when the delegation would travel to Cairo.
Hamas has not said what its response will be to the Egyptian unity proposal, which Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas s Fatah has already signed.
On Friday Cairo announced that its mediators had delayed to an unspecified date their deadline for Hamas to sign the unity deal at the Islamists request.
Ongoing tensions between Hamas and Fatah came to a boil in June 2007 and ended with the Islamists routing their rivals from the Gaza Strip after a week of deadly street clashes, cleaving the Palestinians into two hostile camps. -AFP
