Top Fatah official and Hezbollah leader meet in Lebanon

Azzam al-Ahmad and Sheikh Naim Qassem said to discuss need to counter US-Israeli ‘attempts to end the Palestinian national project’

By Adam Rasgon 17 January 2019, 8:39 pm

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Adam Rasgon is a former Palestinian affairs reporter at The Times of Israel

Azzam al-Ahmad gives a press conference at a hotel in Cairo, August 13, 2014. (photo credit: AFP/Khaled Desouki)

Top Fatah and Palestine Liberation Organization official Azzam al-Ahmad met Deputy Hezbollah Secretary-General Sheikh Naim Qassem in Lebanon, the official Palestinian Authority news site Wafa reported on Thursday.

Senior Fatah and PLO officials do not frequently meet high-ranking Hezbollah leaders. The last known time Ahmad met a senior Hezbollah official was in late 2017, when he met Hassan Nasrallah, the terror group’s secretary-general.

Both the United States and Israel consider Hezbollah to be a terrorist group.

In their meeting, Ahmad and Qassem affirmed “the need to fight against the American-Israeli attempts to end the Palestinian national project,” the Wafa report said.

Both the Palestinians and Hezbollah have recently been highly critical of the US and Israel’s policies regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Since shortly after US President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December 2017 and initiated the relocation of the US embassy in the Jewish state to the city, PA President Mahmoud Abbas declared the Palestinians would no longer work with an American-dominated peace process and called for the establishment of a multilateral mechanism to replace it.

The deputy chief of Lebanon’s powerful Shiite terror group Hezbollah, Sheikh Naim Qassem, speaks during the funeral of Mustafa Badreddine, a top Hezbollah commander who was killed in an attack in Syria, at the martyrs’ cemetery in the Ghobeiry neighborhood of southern Beirut on May 13, 2016. (AFP/Stringer)

In the wake of Trump’s decision, Abbas has invited a number of countries around the world to take part in a multilateral mechanism for the peace process and repeatedly said he would not consider an American plan.

Over the past two days, Ahmad has met several officials in Lebanon, including President Michel Aoun.

On Thursday afternoon, Ahmad did not answer phone calls.

Earlier this week, he also visited Syria, where he met Deputy Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad and attended the opening of a new office of Palestine TV, the official PA channel, in Damascus.

At the opening of the Palestine TV office, he told a Syrian newspaper that he believes Abbas will visit Syria in the near future.

“The visit of the President Mahmoud Abbas is possible at any time… I believe [it] will happen soon, if God wills it,” he told al-Watan, a pro-Syrian government newspaper.

The PA president has not visited Syria or met Syrian President Bashar Assad since civil war broke out in the country in 2011.