A senior Hamas official on Wednesday announced that the Islamic movement will not boycott an upcoming round of unity talks with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party, scheduled to take place in Cairo next month, reports Xinhua.
"We received an Egyptian invitation to participate in the dialogue and we told our Egyptian brothers that we had accepted the invitation," said Salah al-Bardaweel, a Gaza-based senior Hamas lawmaker.
In an interview with Xinhua, al-Bardaweel said his movement decided to join the dialogue after "receiving promises that Egypt will put pressure on the Palestinian Authority to stop politically- motivated arrests against Hamas members in the West Bank."
Earlier, Hamas threatened to boycott the dialogue in protest of what it says a Fatah-led clamp down on its fighters in the Israeli- occupied West Bank. Four Hamas gunmen, four policeman and a civilian were killed in two armed confrontations last week in the West Bank city of Qalqilya.
However, al-Bardaweel ruled out making any progress in the talks "as long as all jailed Hamas members are not freed from the PA prisons in the West Bank."
The Egyptian-sponsored dialogue was launched in February and five rounds of talks between Hamas and Fatah have been completed since then but without reaching any deals on most controversial issues.
The dialogue seeks to restore political unity to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and overcome the consequences of Hamas's 2007 violent takeover of Gaza.
Hamas's decision to go ahead in the dialogue was made a day after its exiled chief Khaled Mashaal visited Cairo and held a series of talks with Egyptian officials, including intelligence chief Omar Suleiman.