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Hamas to form Cabinet with no coalition partners

Hamas said yesterday it has completed the formation of a government, two weeks ahead of deadline, but apparently without coalition partners that might have softened the militants' image.

In another possible setback, the Hamas government program is not expected to win the approval of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who was to meet with the group's leaders in Gaza later yesterday. Abbas aides said the Palestinian leader considers the Hamas platform too vague and wants it rewritten.

Hamas cannot present its Cabinet to parliament for approval without backing from the moderate Abbas, who was elected separately and wields considerable authority.

However, Abbas cannot impose his own Cabinet lineup on Hamas, which swept January parliament elections and controls an absolute majority in the legislature.

Abbas is expected to put off the approval of a new government until after Israel's March 28 election, but his confidants say he is not ready to force a full-blown political crisis with the Islamic militants.

Mahmoud Zahar, a hardline Hamas firebrand, will almost definitely be named foreign minister, according to a preliminary list of Cabinet ministers given to the Associated Press by anonymous officials in Hamas and the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the list has not been finalized.

Said Siyam, a popular Hamas lawmaker from Gaza, has been tapped for the interior and civil affairs ministries, which control three of the Palestinian's five security forces and is responsible for contacts with Israel's security services, the officials said.

Siyam, who is considered a relative moderate, was among hundreds of militants deported by Israel to south Lebanon in 1992. He recently joined a Hamas delegation to Moscow, where they met top Russian officials.

If the PFLP decides to join the Hamas government, it will be awarded the finance ministry, the officials said. If the PFLP stays out of the government, Omar Abdel-Razek, a professor at Nablus' a-Najah University, will be named finance minister. Abdel-Razek was released from an Israeli prison just a few days ago.

Two professors from the Islamic University in Gaza are likely to be named to the public works and higher education ministries, the officials said.

The wrangling over the new government comes at a time when some officials in Abbas' Fatah Party are calling on him to resign and to dissolve the Palestinian Authority, to protest Israel's raid of a West Bank prison earlier this week.

The raid, in which troops snatched Ahmed Saadat, the leader of a small PLO faction, and other suspects in the assassination of an Israeli Cabinet minister, was a major blow to Abbas' prestige.
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