President Mahmoud Abbas (left) while appointing Muhammad Mustafa to form a new government (Reuters)
The Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah) said that it deplores and is surprised by the talk of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) about exclusivity and division, after Hamas and Palestinian factions - yesterday, Friday - described efforts to form a new Palestinian government without national consensus as “reinforcing the policy of exclusivity and deepening division.” .
This came in a statement by the movement published by the Palestinian News Agency (Wafa), in response to another statement by Palestinian factions - including Hamas - in which they denounced the assignment of President Mahmoud Abbas Muhammad Mustafa to form a new government without a national consensus.
The Fatah movement expressed its "surprise and disapproval at Hamas' talk of exclusivity and division," and said, "The real disconnect from reality and the Palestinian people is the leadership of Hamas, which has not yet felt the magnitude of the catastrophe that our oppressed people are experiencing."
She said that the Palestinian President has the right "under the Basic Law to do everything that is in the interest of the Palestinian people, and assigning Muhammad Mustafa to form the government falls within the core of the President's political and legal responsibilities."
She continued, "The priorities set by the mandate letter are the priorities of the Palestinian people."
She stated that "the priority of all Palestinians today is to stop the war immediately, prevent displacement, provide relief to our afflicted people, rebuild the Gaza Strip, end the division, and reunite the Palestinian homeland."
Yesterday, Friday, Palestinian factions denounced appointing Mustafa to form a new government without national consensus, in a move they considered “a reinforcement of the policy of exclusivity and deepening division,” questioning the feasibility of replacing one government with another and a prime minister with another “from the same political environment.”
A statement by those factions - which included Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Palestinian National Initiative - said that the national priority is currently “to confront the Israeli aggression and the war of extermination and starvation” that the occupation is waging against the Gaza Strip.
Last Thursday, the Palestinian President assigned the head of the Palestine Investment Fund (the sovereign fund), Muhammad Mustafa, to form a new government to succeed Muhammad Shtayyeh, who submitted his resignation last February.
It is noteworthy that the Prime Minister-designate is not a member of the Fatah movement led by Abbas, but he is an “independent” member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and has held a number of positions in previous governments, in addition to heading the Palestine Investment Fund, one of the PLO institutions since 2015.
All of this comes in the wake of a devastating war in Gaza since the seventh of last October, which left massive destruction to the infrastructure and tens of thousands of civilian casualties, accompanied by an Israeli escalation in the West Bank, despite the entry of the month of Ramadan, and the appearance of Tel Aviv before the International Court of Justice on charges of "Genocide" against the Palestinians.
Source: Agencies