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Hamas accuses Fatah of wrecking unity efforts

DAMASCUS — The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas on Monday accused its rivals in the Fatah party of president Mahmud Abbas of sabotaging reconciliation efforts with a campaign of arrests in the West Bank.

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“The arrests carried out by the security services of Mahmud Abbas and (premier) Salam Fayyad against symbols of national action and representatives of the Palestinian people are poisoning the atmosphere,” it said.

Hamas, in a statement issued in the Syrian capital where its political leadership in exile is based, said the arrests were “raising new obstacles to Palestinian national reconciliation.”

It said “more than 50 armed men of the security services of the Palestinian Authority on Sunday night raided the home of MP Fathi al-Qarawi, arrested one of his sons and confiscated computers.”

And a preacher, Tamam Abu Saud, was “kidnapped” from her home in the West Bank city of Nablus, Hamas said.

Such actions “prove Mahmud Abbas is not serious in wanting to achieve a reconciliation (with Hamas),” it said, protesting what it said was “provocation” aimed at sabotaging any deal between Fatah and the Islamists who rule the Gaza Strip.

Hamas also charged that Abbas’s security services were working “in close coordination with those of the Israeli occupation” in the West Bank, where Fatah has control.

Fatah last week accused Hamas of plotting to kill one of its governors in the West Bank, an accusation which the Islamists denied. A number of suspects were rounded up in connection with the alleged plot.

The Palestinian rival factions had agreed to resume reconciliation talks after last week’s Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha, following two rounds of talks in Damascus, held earlier this month and in September.

They have been fiercely divided since Hamas seized power in Gaza in a bloody rout of Abbas’s forces in 2007.

A series of attempts at reconciliation, mainly mediated by Egypt, have failed with Fatah and Hamas accusing each other of undermining trust by persecuting political rivals in the territory under its control.