Fatah and Hamas discuss reconciliation in Algeria

ALGIERS, Algeria — Divided Palestinian factions met in Algiers today amid efforts to persuade them to sign a reconciliation deal to lay out timelines to hold elections within a year, officials say.

“The Palestinians have been divided for more than 15 years, which has hugely weakened our cause,” says Azzam al-Ahmed, the head of the Fatah delegation in the Algerian capital.

Ismael Haniyeh, chief of the terror group Hamas, says the Algerian-mediated talks which began Tuesday have been “positive and calm.”

The Fatah party of Palestinian Authority President Mahoud Abbas and its main rival Hamas have been at odds since elections in 2006, which were won by Hamas but never recognized by the international community.

Months later, the Islamist terror organization seized control of the Gaza Strip in a deadly conflict that consolidated years of division, with Fatah administering Palestinian-run areas of the West Bank.

Parliamentary and presidential polls, the first since the division, had been set to take place last year, but were canceled.

Hossam Badran, a senior Hamas official says that they had “agreed to hold elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council, the presidency and the Palestinian National Council within a year.”

But Fatah, whose head Mahmoud Abbas is at meetings in Kazakhstan rather than at the talks in Algiers, sparked doubts yesterday night that a draft agreement would be signed.

It demanded that members of any resulting national unity government abide by international law, a point rejected by Hamas.

“The document proposed by Algeria was general and doesn’t go into details,” says Palestinian analyst Khalil Shaheen.