Hamas won't push Fatah to end talks with Israel: Zahar
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Hamas has no intention of pressing Fatah to halt peace talks with Israel following a unity deal between the two factions, a senior leader in the Islamist movement told AFP on Thursday.
Mahmud Zahar, a Hamas official from Gaza, said although the Islamists were committed to their strategy of "no recognition and no negotiations" with Israel, they would not insist that Fatah, which is headed by Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas, stop negotiating with Israel.
"If Fatah wants to bear the responsibility for negotiating on nonsense, let it. If it manages to get a state, good for them," Zahar told AFP in Cairo.
"We didn't view what was happening as a peace process, so we didn't take part in it," he said, referring to more than 20 years of talks which have yielded limited autonomy in the West Bank while Israel expanded its settlements in the territory.
Zahar said the interim government, which will be composed of figures agreed on by the two factions, would have no mandate to hold negotiations with Israel.
Both sides also agreed to release political prisoners and restructure the security forces in Gaza and West Bank.
Hamas, which rejects Israel's right to exist because it believes it was created on Palestinian land, has in the past said it would be willing to consider a long-term truce with the Jewish state.
The Islamist movement, which won a parliamentary election in 2006, seized power in the Gaza Strip a year later following a week of bloody street battles with Fatah.
Direct negotiations between Abbas's West Bank-based Palestinian Authority and Israel stalled late in 2010 over an intractable dispute about ongoing Jewish settlement activity.
Following the collapse of peace talks, Abbas has been pursuing a diplomatic strategy aimed at securing UN recognition for a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with east Jerusalem as its capital, in a move likely to take place in September.
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