Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Wednesday he would call early elections, harshly denouncing the Islamic Hamas for its Gaza takeover, declaring, "even the devil cannot match their lies."
In a speech on Wednesday, Abbas asked the Palestine Central Council, a Palestinian Liberation Organization decision-making body, to endorse his call for elections that aides said would be designed to freeze Hamas out of the political arena.
Abbas' aides said they expected the election by the end of the year or early nexy year. His announcement came as the US and other international mediators were moving swiftly to try to revive Mideast peace efforts.
Abbas denounced Hamas in the harshest terms in his speech, blaming the Islamist militants for staging "a coup" against him in Gaza and for provoking Israel and Egypt to seal Gaza's borders.
Hamas is "committing capital crimes, bloody crimes against our people every day, every minute, every hour," he fumed. "There will be no dialogue until they return Gaza to what it was before."
"Even the devil cannot match their lies," he said.
In five days of bloody fighting last month, Hamas crushed Fatah gunmen and the presidential security force in Gaza.
Abbas retaliated by dismissing the Hamas-led coalition government formed with Fatah after last year's elections, and created a caretaker government of technocrats and moderates that governs the West Bank but holds little sway in Gaza.
"We will call on the council to decide on early elections," he said. "We won't exclude anybody from having their say in a democratic way."
In Gaza, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said neither Abbas nor the council was empowered to call elections.
"It is not legitimate to issue such a recommendation," he said. "This council has expired and has no mandate and no authority."
In Jerusalem, the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said the proposed elections did not come up in his talks with Abbas.
Solana was on a last trip to the region before a meeting yesterday in Portugal between the EU, UN US and Russia - the "Quartet" of Mideast peacemakers - with their newly appointed emissary, former British prime minister Tony Blair. The meeting was to follow up on US President George W. Bush's call this week for a peace conference in the autumn.
Abbas said the conference, to be chaired by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, should address the core issues of Israel's borders, Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem.
"We have to be ready to establish a Palestinian state when it comes," he said.
Israel has welcomed the movement to revive peace efforts that stalled in 2000, but has been reluctant to deal with the conflict's toughest issues as long as violence continues and Hamas - which rejects Israel's legitimacy as a nation - remains a political factor.
Palestinian officials said Abbas wanted to hold elections before Israel releases Hamas legislators it has arrested, pre-empting the possibility that they could return to parliament and vote the caretaker government from power.
Israel is unlikely to release the legislators except as part of a prisoner exchange for three captured Israeli soldiers, one held in Gaza and two held by the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon.
To further enhance Fatah's election chances, Abbas announced he would change the electoral system, eliminating regional balloting.
Last year, Fatah candidates fought each other in several constituencies, allowing Hamas to win those seats and contributing to Fatah's unprecedented rout.
Instead, Palestinians will vote for parties, and parliament seats would be apportioned according to the percentage of votes each party received.
Though Abbas said the elections will be open to all Palestinians, Hamas said it would oppose the balloting, and it was hard to see how they could be conducted in Gaza.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema