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Ramallah, West Bank: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said yesterday he would call early elections, harshly denouncing the Islamic Hamas in speech before a PLO body, declaring, "even the devil cannot match their lies."
Abbas was addressing the Palestine Central Council in the West Bank city of Ramallah. He heaped criticism on Hamas because of its violent takeover of Gaza last month, when it vanquished Fatah forces loyal to Abbas.
"We will call on the council to decide on early elections," he said. "We want elections because a democratic choice is the right for all the people," he said.
"We won't exclude anybody from having their say in a democratic way."
Abbas said he would call for a change in the electoral system, eliminating regional balloting. The regional voting cost Fatah a number of seats in the 2006 election, when rival Fatah candidates faced each other and handed victories to Hamas. The Islamists handily won the election, defeating Abbas' Fatah.
Instead, Palestinians will vote for parties, a system known as proportional representation. The parliament would be divided among the parties in proportion to the votes they received.
In the speech, Abbas repeated his charge that Hamas carried out a coup against him in Gaza. "Nothing can justify the crime of the coup they committed," he said. Hamas is "committing capital crimes, bloody crimes against our people every day, every minute, every hour," he fumed.
Rafah crossing
"There will be no dialogue until they return Gaza to what it was before." Abbas blamed Hamas for the plight of thousands of Palestinians who are stranded at the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza.
He said his Palestinian authority reached an agreement with Israel to run the crossing with European observers, but when Hamas overran the crossing, the observers left and the crossing remains closed.
"What can we do now?" he said. "They have closed the crossing. To operate the crossing we need the Europeans, and they have left."
Reactivating PLO
He said Hamas is preventing the stranded people from using an alternate route - a crossing where the borders of Israel, Egypt and Gaza meet - by firing rockets and forcing that crossing to remain closed as well.
Abbas said he would call a meeting of the PLO's top decision-making body, the Palestine National Council, to reactivate the PLO. He said it would take over from the paralysed Palestinian legislature. "We have to be ready to establish a Palestinian state when it comes," Abbas said.
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