TANGIERS: Reconciliation with Hamas is the Palestinian National Authority’s (PNA) top priority, senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said on Friday.
“For us, there is no higher interest than reconciliation”, Erakat said.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal will meet in Cairo on Nov.25 for talks to resolve their fractured relationship.
Simmering tensions between Hamas and Abbas’ Fatah party boiled over into street battles in June 2007 and ended with the Islamist Hamas chasing secular Fatah from the Gaza Strip, leaving Abbas’s writ confined to the occupied West Bank.
After nearly four years of fruitless reconciliation efforts, in May Fatah unexpectedly signed a deal with Hamas under which both sides were to have set up a caretaker government of independents ahead of elections within a year.
But the agreement has never been implemented, with both sides bickering over the composition of the interim government and who should head it.
Bank tax
The Hamas rulers of Gaza have ordered two banks to pay out more than $100 million following a lower court ruling, bank bosses said on Friday.
A board member from the Islamic Bank of Palestine said that following the decision, $6 million of his bank’s assets had been preventively frozen and $100 million from the Bank of Palestine.
The court decision also barred board members from either bank from leaving the Gaza Strip, the source said asking not to be named.
The banker denounced the decision, saying: “All banks in Gaza pay no taxes in accordance with an exemption extended in 2007 by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.”
gulftoday.ae
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