ISTANBUL: Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas said Monday that he would send a delegation to the Gaza Strip to seek reconciliation with the Islamist Hamas movement after Israel’s deadly aid flotilla raid.
"The best answer to (the raid)… is for Palestinian groups to reconcile and resist Israel hand-in-hand," Abbas told Turkey’s NTV news channel in Istanbul where he was to attend a meeting of an Asian security grouping.
"We have put together a delegation from the Palestinian leadership to go to Gaza and persuade Hamas to reconcile," he said with a voice-over translation into Turkish.
The only condition for reconciliation is for Hamas to accept the plan drawn up by Egypt last year which called on the two groups to make peace and hold elections, he said.
"I believe and hope that this time we will succeed," the Palestinian leader added.
Abbas’s Fatah movement and Hamas have remained deeply divided since the Islamists seized control of Gaza in 2007, in a rift that has widened since Israel’s devastating war on the enclave in late 2008 and early 2009.
Israel has sealed Gaza off to all but very limited humanitarian aid in a bid to pressure Hamas to end cross-border rocket attacks.
Abbas described as a "massacre" last week’s Israeli raid on a flotilla of aid ships bound for Gaza which left nine Turks dead, and called for more aid convoys to pressure the Jewish state into scrapping the blockade.
"If these convoys have been unsuccessful in lifting the blockade, then efforts must undoubtedly be intensified," he said of the crippling restrictions which have been in place since 2006.
"All methods must be tried in order to end the embargo and pressures imposed on the Palestinian people."
