Hamas piles up pressure on Abbas

Gaza: Anger over the Palestinian National Authority's (PNA) support for delaying the UN Human Rights Council's (UNHRC) vote on the Gaza war report brimmed over with calls mounting to isolate those responsible for the move.

Taking umbrage with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party over the issue, the Hamas resistance movement has expressed reluctance to go ahead with a power-sharing deal that Egypt has been trying to broker.

The investigation conducted by a UN fact-finding mission led by South African Justice Richard Goldstone had found Israel guilty of war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity during the invasion of Gaza from December 27 to January 18.

"Abbas should apologise to the Palestinian people because he personally asked to postpone a vote on the United Nations fact-finding report that convicted the Israeli occupation for war crimes against Gaza," said Salah Al Bardawil, a Hamas official.

The Egyptian efforts to mediate power-sharing talks are aimed at bringing about political reconciliation between the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which is ruled by the Fatah-dominated PNA.

Last week, Abbas decided to form "a national committee" to investigate the decision to delay the vote on the Goldstone report, an aide to Abbas said.

The Palestinian committee is headed by Hanna Amira, a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation's executive committee, said Yasser Abed Rabbo, Abbas' adviser.

"The committee will carry out a comprehensive investigation into the circumstances of postponing the vote on Goldstone's report and will define who is responsible for that," Rabbo said in a media statement.

Probe in two weeks

The investigation is scheduled to be completed in two weeks, Abed Rabbo added.

Earlier, the PNA had denied that it had supported the postponement of the vote on the report, but the Palestinian ambassador to Geneva, Ebrahim Khrisheh, confirmed that he had asked the UNHRC on October 2 to delay the voting to the next session in March 2010 "to secure more consensus against Israel".

The Palestinian factions, including Abbas' Fatah movement, said the postponement was in Israel's favour. If the 47-nation UNHRC had adopted Goldstone's recommendation, the report would have gone to the UN General Assembly and brought Israel one step closer to prosecution.

Last week, a coalition of 14 local and Arab human rights organisations had called for questioning Abbas over the PNA's stance in Geneva.

Ahmad Bahar, Deputy Speaker of the Hamas-dominated Palestinian Parliament, said that Abbas and his prime minister, Salam Fayyad, "ordered the ambassador Khrisheh to work on scuttling the vote move".

Hussain Al Shaikh, a member of the newly elected central committee of Fatah, retorted, "There is a radical group within the Hamas movement which doesn't want to finalise a reconciliation agreement that brings Palestinian unity back and end the current bitter split."

"When the Goldstone report was issued and accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes, Hamas rejected it, and now when the voting was postponed for six months, Hamas suddenly supports it and uses the issue of postponing to attack President Abbas and block any chance for reconciliation."

But Al Bardawil says Hamas "thinks the Palestinian people will not accept us shaking hands with those who denied the blood of our martyrs and wounded people".