Hamas: Cairo meeting aims to put ‘mechanisms to implement reconciliation deal’

Palestinian Islamic Movement Hamas said that it is going to Cairo on Tuesday to agree on the “mechanisms to implement the reconciliation deal” reached in 2011, Anadolu reported.

“We will discuss in Cairo the issue of the PLO, general elections, security, social reconciliation, public freedoms and the formation of a national unity government,” Member of Hamas Political Bureau Khalil al-Hayya said in a meeting organised by the Palestinian Journalists’ Club that held in Gaza.

On October 12, Hamas and its secular rival movement Fatah signed a deal in Cairo, brokered by Egypt, to enable the ongoing Government of National Accord to take up its responsibilities in Gaza.

As part of the agreement, all the Palestinian movements are planned to meet in Cairo on November 21 to agree on the outstanding issues based on the reconciliation deal reached in 2011, which, according to Al-Hayya, stipulates the formation of a 16-member committee to run the government in Gaza and West Bank.

“We have to form this committee or for a new national unity government [during Cairo talks],” Al-Hayya stressed, noting that “a new government is urgently needed as it became a popular and national demand.”

Regarding the PLO, he said that the Palestinian factions are to discuss “reorganising its institutions, on top of which the Palestinian National Council, and to make it ready to accept membership of all the Palestinians.”

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He stressed on the importance to agree on a time and date, as well as a law for the elections of the Palestinian National Council, noting that Hamas has agreed during previous meetings with the Palestinian factions to form a leadership frame “to lay out general bases and policies” of the Palestinian issue.

The Hamas leader also stressed on the importance to agree during the Cairo meeting on a time and date for the Palestinian general elections that “should not exceed six months.”

About the security issues, he said: “It had an intensive care during the previous meetings as the reorganisation of the security services is going to be done under Egyptian and Arab supervision.”

He added: “The reorganisation should start by the formation of an eight-member security committee, which enjoys national consensus, and the PA President Mahmoud Abbas is to issue a decree approving it.”

During the work of this committee, he said, 3,000 security staff, affiliate to Abbas, would be gradually merged in the current security apparatuses in Gaza, which affiliate to Hamas.

Regarding to the social reconciliation, which is led by the dismissed Fatah leader Mohamed Dahlan, Al-Hayya said that the Palestinian factions completed the files of 140 cases –up to 20 to 25 per cent of the total case.