A senior negotiator for the Palestinian group Fatah said on Tuesday that Fatah was no longer asking rival group Hamas to restore the status quo that existed in Gaza before the Islamists took control in June 2007. Nabil Shaath, the head of a Fatah delegation in Cairo for talks with Egyptian mediators on a Palestinian reconciliation package, said Fatah was taking a more flexible position.
For months Fatah has said that reconciliation with Hamas depends on reversing what Palestinian President and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas has repeatedly called a Hamas coup in Gaza. But Shaath told Reuters: "We are not calling for this (the reversal of the coup)... We are not asking anybody to apologize. We are not asking anybody to go back to where we were. We want to go forward, not backward."
He said Fatah, which continues to control the Palestinian Authority and the West Bank, accepted an Egyptian proposal that the Palestinians form a new "national government of consensus".
"It may or may not have people from any of the (Palestinian) organizations but it will have people accepted by the organizations and also accepted by the Arabs and also have international acceptance," he added. Asked if this meant that Fatah was taking a more flexible position in the talks, Shaath said: "Yes."
A national consensus government would end exclusive Hamas control of Gaza but simultaneously give the Islamist movement more influence in the West Bank.
The settlement proposed by Egypt would reunite Palestinian security forces, ending Hamas's monopoly over security in Gaza in favor of a force acceptable to both sides.
Officials of Hamas and Fatah said privately that Shaath's remarks may represent a change of tone. But they also said that Fatah's underlying position was the same as before. Senior Fatah official Azzam al-Ahmad, who is in Cairo with Shaath's delegation, told Reuters by telephone: "There is no change in Fatah's position."
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said: "There was nothing new in the statement by Nabil Shaath because Fatah and other PLO factions stick to the legitimacy of the president and marginalize and sideline the other legitimacies."
"In Hamas we stress that any dialogue and any results of a dialogue should be based on respecting the results of the parliamentary election (won by Hamas in 2006) and all the Palestinian legitimacies," Abu Zuhri added.
Shaath's delegation had talks on Tuesday with Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who has been meeting all this month with a succession of Palestinian factions. Shaath said that talks between Suleiman and a Hamas delegation would start on Oct. 8 and the Egyptians would bring together all the factions in the first week of November.