CAIRO: Egypt will send a security team to the Gaza Strip to help implement a reconciliation agreement reached by rival Palestinian groups Fatah and Hamas, an Egyptian security source told Reuters on Thursday.
Restructuring and unifying security forces in Hamas-run Gaza is a key condition for the success of the accord, brokered by Egypt on Wednesday to overcome a rift that had stifled a Palestinian drive for independence.
"An Egyptian security delegation will head to Gaza to help settle and organise the internal security situation there, now that the reconciliation agreement is finally in place," said the security source, who declined to be identified.
He said the security team would seek to meld the disparate security forces belonging to Palestinian factions in Gaza, but declined to explain how.
The deal provides for the creation of a non-factional professional security force which would be subject to scrutiny by the Palestinian legislature.
Another security source said the team would consist of specialists from various branches of the Egyptian army. Like in a previous mission that ended in 2007, Egypt’s intelligence service will oversee the team’s work in Gaza.
Hamas has ruled Gaza since it routed Fatah-led security forces in 2007, a year after it won a Palestinian general election. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah prevails in the much larger West Bank, where Israel remains in overall control in the territory it captured in a 1967 war.
The reconciliation pact calls for setting up an interim unity government to replace the factional administrations that currently run West Bank and Gaza, and prepare for presidential and legislative elections within a year.
Abbas, Meshaal to sign accord
A new ballot is long overdue. Israel is worried such a vote could hand Hamas control of the occupied West Bank.
Abbas, who is also the head of the secular Fatah movement, and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, who is based in Syria’s capital Damascus, will sign the deal in Cairo next week.
Forging Palestinian unity is regarded as crucial to reviving any prospect for an independent Palestinian state. Western powers demand that any unity government honor peace deals with Israel, renounce violence and recognize Israel.
Egypt had been trying to broker a reconciliation deal for years. Analysts say a popular uprising that had swept president Hosni Mubarak, Abbas main ally, from power in February and protests rocking Syria, Hamas’s main patron, has helped bring the two sides together.
An Egyptian security mission, led by Major-General Burhan Hammad, quit the Gaza Strip after Hamas seized control of the Strip following fierce clashes with Fatah in 2007. Then-spy chief Omar Suleiman oversaw the mission.
Egypt drafted a reconciliation agreement in 2009 calling for setting up a professional police force from the Hamas-led police currently in control of the Gaza Strip and forces loyal to Abbas’s Fatah faction who ruled the area before 2007.
Hamas refused to sign that accord, demanding amendments be made to the text before endorsing it.
Abbas met with the head of Egypt’s ruling military council, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, earlier this month to discuss reconciliation efforts. "This was a very important meeting and it laid out Egypt’s role in the coming period as the agreement is carried out," the first security source said.
Israel’s hawkish Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Defense Minister Ehud Barak both warned that the Jewish state would never accept a Hamas government, AFP reported.
"With this accord, a red line has been crossed," Lieberman told Israel’s military radio on Thursday, threatening an array of retaliatory measures, while Barak said the army would "use an iron fist to deal with any threat" and vowed to "never negotiate with Hamas."
Hamas said it had no plans to talk with Israel but would not stop Fatah from holding negotiations.
"If Fatah wants to bear the responsibility for negotiating on nonsense, let it. If it manages to get a state, good for them," senior Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar told AFP in Cairo. –Additional reporting by AFP
