Palestinian Factions Failed To Pass Joint Statement Due To Lack Of Time - Hamas Delegate

Palestinian Factions Failed to Pass Joint Statement Due to Lack of Time - Hamas Delegate

Palestinian factions participating in the Moscow talks failed to adopt a joint statement due to the lack of time to agree on all issues, Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook, the deputy chief of the Political Bureau of the Hamas Islamist movement and the head of the movement's delegation to the ongoing talks in the Russian capital, said on Wednesday

MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 13th February, 2019) Palestinian factions participating in the Moscow talks failed to adopt a joint statement due to the lack of time to agree on all issues, Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook, the deputy chief of the Political Bureau of the Hamas Islamist movement and the head of the movement's delegation to the ongoing talks in the Russian capital, said on Wednesday.

The third intra-Palestinian meeting in Moscow started on Monday and will last through Wednesday. Earlier in the day, a member of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), Moatassim Hamada, told Sputnik that participants of the talks decided to annul the final statement due to the lack of consensus on a number of its points related to East Jerusalem.

"We discussed our problems within two days. We agreed about most of the points which we were talking about ... Somebody wrote something [in the draft statement] that was not discussed and there was a dispute about these points. Then we did not have time to dissolve all of these problems and decided that there is no announcement," Abu Marzook told reporters.

He expressed hope that all these disagreements would be addressed during the next intra-Palestinian meeting in Cairo.

"All of the points that we have disagreements about we are going to discuss them in the future in Cairo," Abu Marzook said.

In 2005, following the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, the Palestinian National Authority a governing body for both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank took control of both enclaves. But the unity within the Palestinian Authority did not last long and a conflict erupted between Fatah and Hamas in 2006, resulting in the split of the authority and Hamas taking over the Gaza Strip. The West Bank is still controlled by Fatah.

Russia is one of mediators in both the Israeli conflict and the intra-Palestinian talks. US President Donald Trump's administration has meanwhile also been working on its peace plan for Israeli-Palestinian settlement for months. The Palestinians later rejected Washington's involvement in the conflict settlement after Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moved the US embassy there in May 2018. The United States did this in spite of the fact that the United Nations has recommended diplomatic missions not be established in the city until its legal status is settled.