RAMALLAH (West Bank), May 25: Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas gave Fatah and Hamas a deadline on Thursday to end their deadly rivalry or else he would call a referendum for a consensus on the borders of an independent state.

Abbas’s shock announcement came on the first day of cross-party talks aimed at drawing a line under divisions between his Fatah movement and the extremists of Hamas who now head the government after winning a January election.

The national dialogue in Ramallah was called in the face of an upsurge in violence between Fatah and Hamas that has left 10 people dead since the beginning of the month.

As was widely expected, both Abbas and Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya urged armed groups to stop turning their guns on each other.

But Abbas’s warning that they had 10 days to agree on a common platform or he would submit to referendum a proposal from jailed faction leaders on how to end the Palestinian crisis caught everyone off guard.

“If not, I will submit the document to a referendum in 40 days,” he said.

The initiative drawn up by the jailed faction leaders and made public on May 10 sets out ways to ‘preserve Palestinian unity’.

The blueprint proposes that activities be ‘confined to the territories occupied in 1967’ — which could signal an end to attacks inside Israel — and calls for the creation of a national unity government.

It also advocates an independent state in territory occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, incorporating the whole of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem.

Were Hamas to accept the document, it would entail an implicit recognition of Israel’s right to exist although its charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state.—AFP