July 20, 2007	Friday	Rajab 04, 1428

GAZA CITY, July 19: Hamas on Thursday launched a vitriolic attack on Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, accusing him of conspiring with Israel and warning it would scupper the early elections he favours.

“Abbas has lost all credibility as president of the Palestinian people,” a hardline Hamas leader, Mahmud Zahar, said at a press conference in Gaza.

“Early elections are an attempt to bypass the will of the Palestinian people and this attempt is bound to failure. It will fail. We, the Palestinian people, will scupper it,” said the onetime foreign minister in a Hamas cabinet.

“The Palestinian people, of which Hamas is a part, will not accept early elections designed to satisfy America,” Zahar said. “We are 100 per cent sure that these elections will be rigged.”

Zahar spoke a day after Abbas asked the Palestine Liberation Organisation central council to approve the holding of early elections following the bloody takeover of Gaza by Hamas on June 15.

In his speech before the council, Abbas was as scathing, ruling out dialogue with the “putschist” Hamas who “have dug their own grave” by committing “crime after crime and murder after murder against the sons of our people.”

In the months of tensions between Hamas and Abbas's Fatah, the Islamists have reserved their most virulent criticism at “collaborators” within the Palestinian Authority.

But on Thursday, Zahar launched the verbal salvoes directly at Abbas, saying he was not worthy of leading his people.

“He conspires with the enemy to assassinate Hamas chiefs by affirming that they have dug their own grave,” Zahar said. “There is an Israeli plan for a Gaza incursion with the agreement of Abu Mazen (Abbas).

Zahar asked: “Can a man who allies with the enemy against his people remain the president of these people?”

Zahar said that a deployment of an international force in Gaza — as called for by Abbas following the Islamists' takeover —would amount to a new occupation, after the withdrawal of Israeli soldiers and settlers in 2005.

“Can someone who calls for a re-occupation of the Gaza Strip be president of the Palestinian people?” Zahar asked.

He denounced Abbas's refusal to hold any dialogue with Hamas “while he salutes (Israeli Prime Minister) Ehud Olmert with accolades and kisses.”

He also accused Abbas of being directly responsible for the closure of the Rafah border crossing and the suffering of several thousand people stuck there.

Rafah is Gaza's only border crossing that bypasses Israel and has been closed since the Islamists' takeover of the territory on June 15. Some 6,000 Palestinians have been stuck on the Egyptian side, unable to return home.

Dismissing Hamas's diatribe, a close aide of Abbas, Nabil Amr, said: “These statements are going directly into the trash bin.”

“Slander is the only weapon that remains in the hands of Hamas,” Amr said.

“The PLO and the Palestinian Authority are proud of president Abbas's leadership. The nightmare that currently reigns in the Gaza Strip will soon be over,” he said.

The PLO — of which Hamas is not a member — is considered as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians the world over and its central committee is empowered with taking key decisions, like the creation of the Palestinian Authority in 1994. The last Palestinian parliamentary elections took place in January 2006.

In a shock win, they were swept by Hamas, who won 74 seats — compared to 45 mandates for long-dominant Fatah — in the 132-member chamber.—AFP