CAIRO, Jan 30: Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas and Hamas were hardening their positions on Wednesday over ways to control the Egypt-Gaza border as Cairo scrambled for a deal between the rival groups.

After talks with President Hosni Mubarak, Abbas reiterated his rejection of talks with Hamas and said the Islamist group’s breach of the Egyptian border over a week ago amounted to an “invasion”. “Hamas has to go back on its coup d’etat and ... accept the legitimacy (of the Palestinian Authority) and then hearts and minds would be open for dialogue,” he said, referring to Hamas’s violent ouster of the PA from Gaza last June.

“If not, dialogue with them will have no interest, will not be profitable,” said Abbas, who heads the rival Fatah faction.

“We talked about what happened in Gaza, the Israeli blockade and what happened after that concerning the invasion of the Egyptian borders,” Abbas told reporters.

A Hamas delegation led by political supremo Khaled Meshaal was expected in the Egyptian capital for talks on Thursday with Egypt’s powerful intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, a Hamas spokesman in Cairo told AFP.

Abbas, who has the support of the West and Israel, met Mubarak as security forces in the divided border town of Rafah moved to secure the breached frontier.

Hundreds of thousands of Gazans have swarmed across the border from their isolated territory since the border barricades were blown up on January 22 after Israel imposed a punishing blockade.

Militants from Hamas stood guard on the Palestinian side of the border as Egyptian forces barred traffic at all but two crossing points.

The group rejects any international presence on crossings between Egypt and the Gaza Strip.

“Any attempts to supplant the vision of Hamas, especially regarding the operation of the Rafah border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, will yield nothing but failure,” Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said.

Under a 2005 deal, the Rafah crossing was supposed to be supervised by European Union monitors with cameras to allow Israel to see those passing through.

Mubarak was not expected to meet the Hamas representatives given their historic links to Egypt’s own powerful Islamist opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the West’s rejection of Hamas as a peace partner.

Al-Ahram newspaper reported that a deadline for Palestinians to return to Gaza had been set for “the start of next week,” citing security sources, and that Gazans remaining in Egypt would be “punished”.—AFP