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Report says Hamas could condone talks with Israel

JERUSALEM: A prominent Hamas political leader has said the Islamic militant group could condone talks with Israel after its “strategic shift” in taking part in Palestinian elections, an Israeli daily said on Sunday. “We’ll negotiate (with Israel) better than the others, who negotiated for 10 years and achieved nothing,” Sheikh Mohammed Abu Tir, who is number two on the Hamas slate for this month’s Palestinian parliamentary elections, told Haaretz. He was referring to the ruling Palestinian Fatah faction which has been engaged in on-off talks with Israel since the run-up to the 1993 Oslo accord. “We will not give Israel the justification and the legitimacy to occupy our lands,” he told the paper. But “we are not saying ‘never’. The question of negotiations will be presented to the new parliament and, as with every issue, when we reach the parliament it will be discussed and decided in a rational manner.” The movement’s decision to take part in municipal and parliamentary elections represented a “strategic shift” not just a “tactical” manoeuvre, the paper cited him as saying. Abu Tir was responding to Israeli and US concerns raised by the movement’s soaring ratings in opinion polls ahead of the January 25 Palestinian elections, in which Hamas is fielding candidates for parliament for the first time. In his first telephone conversation with US President George W Bush on Thursday, Israel’s acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said there could be no progress in the Middle East peace process if Hamas entered a Palestinian government. After talks with both Olmert and Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas Friday, a US envoy criticised the participation in the elections of Hamas while it continued to champion armed struggle and reject the Jewish state’s right to exist. “The view of the US is that there should be no place in the political process for groups and individuals who refuse to denounce terror and violence, who do not recognise Israel’s right to exist and refuse to disarm,” said assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs David Welch. Although now firmly in Hamas’s political wing, Abu Tir was freed from an Israeli prison only last year, after spending most of the past three decades in administration detention or serving jail terms for weapons possession and involvement in the group’s military wing, Haaretz recalled. afp

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