PLO reconciliation meeting in Moscow
Hamas and Fatah want to bury enmity
March 1, 2024, 6:32 p.m
In order to force Israel to withdraw from Gaza and to keep the controversial UN aid agency UNRWA alive, rival Palestinian groups have been working on reconciliation. Russia is the patron of a meeting of Hamas, Fatah and eleven other organizations.
According to their own statements, several hostile Palestinian groups want to continue to strive for reconciliation. There will also be further meetings between the Islamist Hamas and the more moderate Fatah, as the factions announced in a joint statement. They had previously met in Moscow on Thursday. The aim of the initiative is to unite all Palestinian forces under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). A total of 13 organizations took part in the meeting in Russia, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Both groups were responsible for the massacre in Israeli border towns on October 7th.
Russia maintains close ties with many Palestinian organizations, including Hamas. Fatah and Hamas – the two largest Palestinian organizations – have been bitter rivals in recent years. Hamas drove Fatah out of the Gaza Strip in bloody power struggles in 2007. There have been reconciliation talks between the two groups for several years. However, Hamas has so far not been able to be integrated into the PLO, which was founded in 1964 to represent the Palestinians and recognized by the United Nations in 1974.
Concern about Israeli reoccupation of the Gaza Strip
The PLO serves as an umbrella organization for several Palestinian groups, the largest being moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah. Among other things, the factions agreed that they wanted to force the Israeli army to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, the statement continued. The groups also spoke out against an Israeli reoccupation of the Gaza Strip. Some right-wing extremist Israeli ministers had called for this. According to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this is not the government’s line.
The Palestinian organizations also demanded protection for the UN Palestinian relief agency UNRWA. Israel had accused several of the organization’s employees of being involved in terrorist acts in Israel. Because of the allegations, 16 countries froze their payments to the aid organization, including the two largest donors, the USA and Germany.