CAIRO (AFP) — Palestinian militant groups were in Cairo on Tuesday for Egyptian-mediated talks on a possible truce with Israel that has already been approved by the Islamist movement Hamas.
The Palestinian factions travelled from Gaza, Damascus and Amman for two days of talks with Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who is in charge of mediating Palestinian-Israeli contacts.
Egypt has been serving as a go-between in truce negotiations as Israel refuses any direct contacts with organisations it considers terror groups.
Rabah Mohanna, from the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), told AFP that the talks would begin Tuesday evening behind closed doors.
Other factions include the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the Popular Struggle Front (PSF) and Islamic Jihad, which fires most of Gaza's rockets at Israel.
The PRC was one of the groups behind the 2006 capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who remains captive pending a prisoner exchange deal.
The Committees' Mohammed al-Baba Baba said he expected Shalit to be discussed but stressed the number of Palestinian prisoners to be swapped in a possible deal was not as important as the length of the prisoners' sentences.
Hamas last week told the Egyptians it would be ready to accept a truce first in the Gaza Strip, to be followed six months later in the West Bank.
Israel has expressed doubts about Hamas's intentions but said it would consider a truce if Hamas stopped firing rockets at Israeli territory and attacking border positions.
However, several of the groups in Cairo told AFP that they were against any phased truce.
"The distinction between the West Bank and Gaza has negative repercussions," said Adel Hakim of the PFLP-General Command, which split from the PFLP in 1968 and maintains strong ties with Syria and Iran.
"Without beginning a truce in the West Bank, Israeli forces as well as the Palestinian Authority will have free rein to disarm Palestinian groups that are hostile to them," Hakim told AFP.
The PRC's Baba also insisted on "an overall period of calm including the West Bank and Gaza, which should be reciprocal and simultaneous with the lifting of the blockade."
The DFLP's Saleh Nasser said a two-phase truce would only "consolidate the separation of the territories and divisions in ranks."
Senior Hamas leader Mahmud Zahar warned on Tuesday that Palestinian armed groups would use "every means" against Israel if it does not accept the proposed truce.
"They can answer yes or no, but if they answer no, then an isolated, starving people, and the well-known Palestinian factions among them, will have no choice but to use every means against Israel to defend ourselves," he said.
The truce talks are taking place against a background of ongoing violence in the Gaza Strip where four children and their mother were killed in an explosion on Monday which Palestinian witnesses blamed on an Israeli missile.
Following the killings, for which Israel said it was not responsible, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that Israel "deeply regrets that civilians not involved (in the violence) are affected."
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas was in Egypt on Sunday and gave his "unconditional" support to Egypt's efforts, asking his ambassador to Cairo, Nabil Amr, to monitor the talks on behalf of his mainstream Fatah movement.
Hamas violently kicked out Fatah forces from the Gaza Strip in June.
"We hope that our Egyptian brothers' determination will contribute to a common Palestinian position concerning the truce and thus put pressure on Israel to accept the truce and lift the blockade," Amr told AFP.
Israel allows only limited basic supplies into the Gaza Strip in an embargo it says aims to force militants to halt their almost daily rocket fire against the Jewish state.
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