Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas is to unveil a unity government by Thursday, ending seven years of rival administrations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, an official said.
“We have finished consultations on the national consensus government,” Azzam al-Ahmed, an envoy from Abbas’s Fatah movement, said Tuesday after talks in Gaza with its Hamas rulers.
“The announcement will come from the president in the next two days.”
The Palestine Liberation Organisation, which is dominated by Fatah, signed a surprise reconciliation deal with Hamas on April 23, giving the two sides five weeks to draw up an “independent government” of technocrats headed by Abbas.
Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority is to head the new government, an official said Thursday.
Hamas, which has its own Gaza prime minister, Ismail Haniya, saying it had “no objection” to the decision.
Agreement on a unity government would pave the way for long-delayed presidential and parliamentary elections.
Hamas won a landslide victory in the last parliamentary polls, in 2006.
But the European Union and the United States have refused to have any dealings with the militant movement until it renounces violence and recognises Israel and past peace deals.
