It seems that neither Hamas nor Fatah, the two largest Palestinian political factions, are ready to make reconciliation efforts successful despite their latest meetings in Turkey and Egypt, according to Palestinian political experts.
On Sunday, 30 July, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas met with various Palestinian factions in the Egyptian capital of Cairo to discuss reconciliation with the Hamas movement. However, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) boycotted the event.
Following the meeting, Abbas said that he established a unified committee to follow up the dialogue between the Palestinian factions to end a 15-year political division and confront ongoing Israeli violations and crimes against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, Jerusalem, and the besieged Gaza Strip.
The meeting held in Egypt at the invitation issued by Abbas to general secretaries of Palestinian factions came after a meeting held between Abbas and Hamas' Islamil Haneiya in Turkey for the first time following their meeting in Algeria a year ago.
"Such meetings will not end the long-term division between both Fatah and Hamas as the political gap has expanded between them, and no one of them is ready to back down from their political positions, especially concerning the Gaza Strip," the political experts said to The New Arab in separate interviews.
A Ramallah-based political analyst, Hani al-Masry, told TNA, "It is challenging for both Fatah and Hamas to reach a real reconciliation, mainly as each one adopts opposite political positions in dealing with the Israeli occupation."
Fatah believes negotiations with Israel and popular resistance are the only ways to solve the long-term conflict with Israel. In contrast, Hamas believes armed resistance can achieve what peaceful agreements between Israel and Palestinians failed to do, according to al-Masri.
Moreover, he says, there is another major issue between Fatah and Hamas that would destroy any efforts of unifying the position of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation as Hamas called to reconstruct and develop it and allow it and PIJ to join it via holding national elections.
"It does not seem that there is a possibility to provide areas where differences intersect that can be started and built upon to remove the rest of the obstacles to ending the division and removing its strong effects," Talal Okal, a Gaza-based political expert, said to TNA.
Okal added that Hamas would not give up its power in Gaza in favour of Fatah or even to other factions that would share it in controlling the territory. In turn, Fatah will not allow Hamas to expand its position in the occupied West Bank.
For this, he explains, both Fatah and Hamas will do their best to maintain the current stalemate until reaching an agreement to formally manage the division and not end it based on exchanging mutual interests in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
"We can find out that the previous agreements left no room for any new idea that could form the beginning after all angles and views have been exhausted," Okal stressed.
Palestinians have been facing a major internal division since the summer of 2007 after Hamas violently seized control of the Gaza Strip, home to more than two million Palestinians.
Several understandings failed to achieve reconciliation between Hamas and Abbas Fatah movement.