Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called on Friday for presidential and parliamentary elections on Jan. 24, in a political gamble that could deepen the split in the divided Palestinian movement, Reuters reported.
His Islamist rivals, Hamas, immediately rejected the election call and suggested they could hold their own ballot in Gaza, creating two rival presidents, two parliaments and two prime ministers.
Abbas is the West's chosen partner-for-peace in stalled talks that U.S. President Barack Obama hopes to resurrect soon with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Iranian-backed Hamas refuses to recognise Israel's right to exist.
An aide to Abbas, who leads the dominant Fatah movement in the West Bank, suggested that both factions might yet agree to patch up their split and take part in a later vote, possibly in June. But the Islamists' angry reaction was a bad omen.
A senior Palestinian official in Ramallah, in the Israeli occupied West Bank, said Abbas, 74, had decided to call for the ballot after the factions failed to reach a unity deal in over a year of Egyptian-brokered talks.
Abbas, who has no clear successor, would be expected to lead his party and seek re-election.
The Western-backed president issued a decree calling for the vote to be held in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. "All concerned parties, the head and members of the election commission ... must execute the terms of this decree," a presidential statement said.
But Gaza, the coastal enclave blockaded by Israel, is fully under the control of Hamas.
The Islamist movement challenges the legitimacy of Abbas's presidency, saying his legal mandate expired in January of this year 2009. It had already threatened to defy any "unilateral" election call by the Palestinian Authority leader.
A senior source in the Hamas administration in Gaza, who declined to be named, told Reuters his government was now studying to possibility of holding an election in Gaza separately, also on January 24, 2010, to counter what he termed Abbas's "unilateral" move. Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2005.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri called the decision "a fatal blow to reconciliation efforts and a prolonging of divisions".
"Abbas has succumbed to American pressures not to reconcile with Hamas unless we recognised the Quartet conditions," Abu Zuhri said.
The so-called Quartet of Middle East envoys -- from the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia -- insist that Hamas recognise Israel's right to exist and renounce violence before taking any place in government.
Senior Hamas politician Mushir Al-Masri called Abbas's election decree "a lethal stab" at reconciliation.
The president's secular Fatah faction has been unable to reach a unity deal with the Islamist group despite a year of talks that have produced no concrete result, and the two movements remain bitter rivals for Palestinian popular support.
Fatah signed on to Egyptian proposals but Hamas, which drove Fatah out of the Gaza enclave in 2007, has so far refused.
An official close to Abbas said there was still time to avoid an open clash that would wreck efforts to patch up the split between the factions.
"If we reach an agreement, the election date can be rescheduled," he said.
Hamas has the power to prevent a credible election taking place on its territory, home to 1.5 million Palestinians. A vote without the full participation of Gaza could effectively create two rival Palestinian powers in separate territories.
About 2.5 million Palestinians live in the West Bank.
An opinion poll earlier this month showed Abbas losing popular support after a series of policy breakdowns over the stalled Middle East peace process and a U.N. report criticising Israel for alleged war crimes in Gaza last January.
The poll indicated that Abbas and Gaza's Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh were about even in popular support, but put support for the president's Fatah party ahead of the Islamists.
Abbas sets gamble on Jan. 24 Palestinian election
