SANAA (AFP) — A PLO delegation in Yemen for a Palestinian reconciliation bid on Tuesday urged the Islamist movement Hamas to return to power-sharing in the embattled Gaza Strip with its Fatah party rivals.
"We hope that our Hamas brothers will accept the (reconciliation) initiative as it has been presented by the Yemeni leadership," Saleh Raafat, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation's executive committee, told AFP.
"Its acceptance would immediately clear the way to an inter-Palestinian national dialogue," he said in Sanaa.
Another member of the delegation, Qaid Abdelkarim, a leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, said that Hamas's agreement in principle would return the rival factions to the negotiating table.
All parties in the PLO, of which Hamas is not a member, support a return to the power-sharing in place in Gaza before last June's deadly battles in which the Islamists evicted the forces of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, he said.
A Hamas delegation is due in the Yemeni capital on Wednesday for separate talks with Yemeni officials on the initiative, which calls for a return to the status quo that existed before the Gaza takeover.
Abbas has welcomed the initiative while it received a cool response from Hamas which has so far rejected his demands to give up control of the impoverished territory which has been under Israeli air strikes and blockade.
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