Hamas and Fatah reached an agreement in principle to deploy 3,000 of the Palestinian Authority's policemen in Gaza, senior Palestinian officials told Israeli site Walla! on Sunday. The policemen are to be deployed along the border with Israel and the Gaza-Egypt border and at the border crossings.
However, the sources stressed the technical details of the agreement have not been outlined nor has the agreement discussed with Israel, which is supposed to approve the transportation of thousands of Palestinian policemen through its territory on the way to Gaza from Ramallah.
Rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah said they reached an agreement on Thursday for the return of their unity government in Gaza ahead of crucial negotiations with Israel next month.
They said the two factions also agreed that the Palestinian Authority would manage Gaza crossings to allow construction material and humanitarian aid to pass ahead of an international donor conference in October.
"Fatah and Hamas have reached a comprehensive agreement for the unity government to return to the Gaza Strip," Jibril Rajoub of Fatah told AFP.
Senior Hamas official Mussa Abu Marzuk and Fatah's head of delegation, Azzam al-Ahmad, confirmed that an agreement had been reached after two days of talks in Cairo. "The unity government will supervise the crossings (into Gaza)... to facilitate the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip," Abu Marzuk said.
He said the two factions agreed to creating a mechanism for construction material to pass in to Gaza.
The two movements have also found a "solution .. to the problem of employees," Abu Marzuk said, referring to the Hamas accusations that the Palestinian Authority had not paid Gaza government employees.
The Islamic world supports Abbas
The world’s largest bloc of Islamic countries has been lobbying the Palestinian Authority to join the International Criminal Court (ICC) so it can prosecute Israeli politicians and military leaders for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, the bloc’s leader told The Associated Press on Saturday.
Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Saudi Iyad Madani, said the 57-nation organization strongly supports Palestinian Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s plan to ask the UN Security Council to impose a deadline for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.
In his address on Friday to the UN General Assembly, Abbas demanded an end to occupation and asserted that Palestinians faced a future in a “most abhorrent form of apartheid” under Israeli rule. Abbas also vowed to seek war crimes prosecutions against Israel over what he called the 50-day "war of genocide" in Gaza.
However, he did not set a deadline for fast-tracking to Palestinian statehood, after aides suggested they were eyeing 2017 as a possible date.
The Palestinians have threatened to join the Hague-based International Criminal Court to allow legal action to be taken against Israel, but Abbas also did not specify in his address whether he would resort to the ICC.
In 2012, the Palestinians won the status of observer state in the United Nations, which gives them the ability to become a party to the ICC, where they could sue Israeli officials over war crimes.
Israel and the United States have expressed strong opposition to Palestinian membership in the international court and have asserted that talks between the two sides remains the best way to achieve a two-state solution to the conflict, a stance that the US reiterated in its condemnation late Friday of Abbas' speech.
Meanwhile, Palestinian sources said over the weekend that Abbas is planning to present to the UN Security Council his plan of ending the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza in the following two weeks.
“This proposal will be submitted because we want to make clear to the international community that the status quo cannot continue infinitely, nor can we be dependent on the good graces of the government of Israel, and that is what Abu Mazen [Abbas] made clear in his [UN] speech,” officials were quoted by Israeli daily Haaretz as saying.
However, Abbas' spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeinah noted that the resolution would not be submitted until after final consultations with Arab countries and member states, including the United States. The Palestinian government will also hold a full cabinet meeting in Gaza at the end of this week.
