Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will hold a referendum by July 31 on a Palestinian statehood proposal that implicitly recognizes Israel, after the Hamas government rejected the plan, officials said on Thursday.
A referendum would be seen as a confidence vote on the new government, whose election led the West and Israel to sever funds to the Palestinian Authority. But it would also put the president's own credibility on the line.
Abbas, who has the power to sack the government, says he can also call a referendum, although Hamas disputes this.
He is due to issue a decree today announcing when the referendum would be held, officials close to the president said. While some said it would take place on July 31, others said it would be 50 days from today, or July 30.
After announcing on Monday he was going ahead with the referendum, Abbas gave Hamas a few more days to reconsider the manifesto penned by Palestinian prisoners in an Israeli jail.
But the officials close to Abbas said since Hamas had shown no sign of accepting the document, the president was setting the referendum date.
"The Palestinian people in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip will be invited to take part in a referendum on the basis of the prisoners' document," one official said.
He said the referendum would ask Palestinians one question: "Do you agree with the prisoners' document or not?"
Hamas officials were not immediately available to comment.
A senior Abbas aide said the referendum could be called off if Hamas fully accepted the document before the vote was held.
The manifesto implicitly recognizes Israel by calling for a Palestinian state on all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
Opinion polls suggest most Palestinians back the proposal.
The referendum move could trigger more violence between Hamas and Abbas's Fatah movement, amid reports that both are accumulating weapons and recruits.
"The referendum is a recipe for a civil war," Khaled Abu Hilal, spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said.
The militant group trounced Fatah in January parliamentary elections and has been locked ever since in a power struggle with Abbas, a moderate who wants peace talks with Israel.
Hamas has said a referendum would be illegal so soon after the elections. It formally seeks to destroy the Jewish state.
Meanwhile, also on Thursday, an Israeli air strike in the Gaza Strip killed a top Palestinian security official, the first time the Jewish state has killed a senior member of the government since the Islamic militant group took office in March.
The militant and anti-Israel Hamas government called Jamal Abu Samhadana's assassination a di-rect assault on the Palestinian Authority, and vowed to continue its resistance against the Jewish state. Abu Samhadana's Popular Resistance Committees faction vowed revenge.
The Israeli military confirmed it struck a PRC training camp in the southern Gaza town of Rafah, saying militants there were planning a large-scale attack on Israel. It would not confirm or deny that Abu Samhadana, the No. 2 man on Israel's wanted list, had been the target.
Abu Samhadana, leader of the small PRC faction, was an explosives expert and a suspect in the fatal 2003 bombing of a U.S. convoy in the Gaza Strip. His recent appointment as Hamas' top enforcer infuriated Israel.
RSS