Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction opened its first conference in 20 years on Tuesday, set to endorse a two-state solution but keep an option of "armed struggle" with Israel, Reuters reported
Officials said a draft of Fatah's new programme calls for new forms of resistance such as civil disobedience against Jewish settlement expansion and a West Bank barrier Israel says is for security but which Palestinians see as a land grab.
Crucially, the draft leaves open the option of "armed struggle" if peace talks with Israel fail and does not rule out a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza Strip if peace negotiations remain stalemated.
Fatah's 400 delegates who live in the Gaza Strip were banned from travelling to the city of Bethlehem for the conference by the territory's Hamas rulers.
A threat by Fatah officials to arrest Hamas members in the West Bank failed to persuade the Islamist group, which violently wrested control of the Gaza Strip from the veteran movement in 2007, to let the delegates go.
Tight security was in place as more than 2,000 delegates gathered for the first Fatah congress since a gathering in Tunis in 1989 and the first to be held on Palestinian soil. It is being hosted at a Christian school near the Church of the Nativity, Jesus' traditional birthplace.
The congress aims to elect a new central committee and ruling council, in the hopes of giving more of a say to a younger generation that grew up fighting Israel's occupation of the West Bank since it captured the territory in a 1967 war.
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