Hamas has agreed to hold talks with the rival Fatah movement, dissolve the Gaza administrative committee and hold general elections, in a deal to end their long-running feud in the Palestinian territories, the group has said in a statement.



The last Palestinian legislative election was held in 2006, when Hamas won a surprise victory that laid the ground for a political rupture. The group fought a short civil war with the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement in the Gaza Strip in 2007, and since then Hamas has governed the territory.

Numerous attempts since 2011 to reconcile the two movements and form a power-sharing unity government in Gaza and the West Bank have failed. They agreed to form a national reconciliation government in 2014, but Hamas’s shadow government has continued to rule Gaza.

A senior Fatah leader, Mahmoud Aloul, welcomed the pledge on Sunday but told Voice of Palestine radio: “We want to see that happening on the ground before we move to the next step.”

Hamas said in its statement that it agreed to dissolve the administration running Gaza, allow the reconciliation government to carry out its duties in the territory, to hold elections and enter into talks with Fatah.

Egypt has been brokering talks with Fatah to implement a deal signed in Cairo with Hamas in 2013 to end the dispute and form an interim government before elections.

In July this year it emerged Hamas was seeking a rapprochement with the Palestinian leader once regarded as its greatest enemy, as the Islamist group faces unprecedented challenges from all sides.

Hamas’s leadership held talks with Mohammed Dahlan – the exiled former Fatah leader in Gaza whose supporters Hamas defeated in the 2007 civil war – in the hope he could persuade Egypt to come to the aid of Gazans struggling under Israel’s decade-long economic blockade.

Hamas’s position has been weakened by developments in the region, including Saudi-led moves against Qatar, once a major financial contributor to Gaza.

The group is also under further pressure from an aggressive policy implemented by Abbas, who governs in the West Bank. In June he asked Israel to significantly cut its electricity supply to Gaza’s 2 million residents.

The electricity crisis comes on top of Gaza’s many other woes. Abbas has also cut the salaries of thousands of former Palestinian Authority employees, many his supporters, who he had instructed not to work for the Hamas government.

Israel’s increasing restrictions on exit permits for Gaza residents, an escalating sewage crisis that is contaminating the strip’s beaches and high levels of unemployment are all contributing to a mounting sense of exhaustion.

Some polls show that if parliamentary elections were held now, Hamas would win them in both Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the seat of Abbas’s Palestinian Authority.

Abbas, 82, is backed by the west and now 12 years into what was to be a four-year term. He is an unpopular leader according to opinion polls. He has no clear successor and there are no steps being taken toward organising a presidential election.