Abbas says no problem with Hamas

JERUSALEM

President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas has said Fatah and Hamas have reached an agreement on a joint political platform and truce with Israel.

There are no differences between the two parties because they have reached an agreement on a joint political platform and a truce with Israel, Abbas said on March 4. “We agreed that the period of calm would be not only in the Gaza Strip, but also in the West Bank,” Abbas said in an interview with Al-Jazeera, the Jerusalem Post reported. “We also agreed on a peaceful popular resistance [against Israel], the establishment of a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders and that the peace talks would continue if Israel halted settlement construction and accepted our conditions.” Abbas said there were no real “political differences” between Fatah and Hamas. He said the recent decision to postpone the formation of a Palestinian unity government, as envisaged by last month’s Qatari-brokered reconciliation deal, was taken due to a dispute within Hamas. “We took the decision at the request of [Hamas leader] Khaled Mashaal, who said that this was not the appropriate time to talk about a unity government because of the dispute […]. I still don’t know what is going on inside Hamas.”