Ramallah: Qatar’s Emir Shaikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani will visit Ramallah for his first ever trip to the West Bank later this month, Palestinian officials said on Sunday.

“The visit of the emir of Qatar has been confirmed but the date of the visit hasn’t been determined yet,” Nabeel Abu Rudaina, spokesman for the Palestinian presidency, told AFP.

“The agreement on the visit came during a meeting with [Palestinian] president [Mahmoud] Abbas in Doha last week,” Abu Rudaina added.

While no final date has been set, he said the trip was expected to take place before the end of this month.

The emir’s visit will be the second by an Arab leader to Ramallah this month, after Jordanian King Abdullah II met with Abbas for talks on December 6.

The trips come after the Palestinians obtained upgraded status at the United Nations last month, winning non-member observer state status, over the objections of Washington and Israel.

In October, the emir made a landmark trip to the Gaza Strip, the first such visit by a head of state since the Islamist movement Hamas took over the territory in 2007.

Meanwhile, Hamas movement and its rival Fatah party of Abbas have traded blame over failing to set up a specific date for resuming the reconciliation talks to end their ongoing internal division.

Officials in the two movements said that a date for holding a meeting of the temporary leading body of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), which was formed last year, hadn’t been set up yet, reported Xinhua. The body was scheduled to convene in Cairo soon.

Azzam Al Ahmad, a Fatah Central Committee member and head of its delegation to the dialogue with Hamas, who is currently in Cairo, said that there are ongoing contacts between the two movements to speed up setting up a date for the meeting. He declined to give more details.

Meanwhile, Ahmad Assaf, Fatah party’s spokesman in Ramallah, said that the meeting will be held in Cairo upon the invitation of President Abbas “only when the circumstances are suitable”.

“The unstable situation in Egypt, which sponsors the reconciliation dialogue between Fatah and Hamas, was the only reason for not setting up a date for the meeting,” said Assaf.

Egypt has been sponsoring the dialogue between the two since Hamas violently seized control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007.

Beside the unstable political situation in Egypt, Abbas and other Fatah leaders hinted that setting up a date was postponed due to Hamas’ internal elections to choose a successor to its chief Khalid Mesha’al. However, Hamas rejected these justifications as “evasion”.

Salah Al Bardaweel, a senior Hamas leader in Gaza, told Xinhua that “the internal Hamas elections can never influence the file of internal reconciliation,” adding: “Hamas leaders are ready to work till the last second in case there is a progress achieved”.

“Fatah is saying illusive justifications on who is delaying the achievement of reconciliation. It seems that it’s not interested in achieving the reconciliation right now because the question of resuming the peace negotiations with Israel is more important than the reconciliation,” said Al Bardaweel.

Assaf responded to Al Bardaweel as saying that the only representative body that decides on the resumption of the talks with Israel “is the PLO,” which represents all the Palestinians, adding “the PLO always keeps in mind the merits and legitimate rights of the Palestinian people”.

Both haven’t met yet, despite recent positive signs that each rival has shown to the other following the Israel-Palestinian conflict last month and the United Nations’ granting Palestine a non-member observer state on November 29.