Balad leader denies meeting with PA intelligence chief in Ramallah

The head of Balad, a faction within the Joint List party, denies having attended reported meetings between other senior Arab Israeli lawmakers and the Palestinian Authority’s intelligence chief.

“I heard about it from the media,” MK Sami Abou Shahadeh tells Army Radio.

According to the Channel 12 news report Friday, the meetings in Ramallah with the PA’s Majed Faraj was also attended by Joint List chief Ayman Odeh and MK Ahmad Tibi, who respectively head the party’s Hadash and Ta’al factions.

The unsourced report said Faraj, a close confidant of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, met the Joint List MKs in an effort to convince them to reunite with Ra’am, which ran separately in the last elections and ended up joining the coalition.