Abbas delays Palestinian election, angering Hamas

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas yesterday announced a delay in the Palestinian parliamentary election, angering the militant group Hamas which had been expected to do well in its first legislative race.

In a public decree, Abbas said he had decided to postpone the July 17 poll to allow time to resolve a dispute over proposed reforms to the voting law.

Hamas called the postponement a "violation of the Palestinian national interest" and of understandings it reached with Abbas to abide by a truce he declared with Israel in February.

Fatah officials said last week the parliamentary poll was likely to be put off because of discord within the party over reforms to the voting law sought by Abbas to give smaller factions like Hamas a better chance of gaining seats.

Abbas has encouraged Hamas, which is sworn to destroying the Jewish state, to enter mainstream politics in the hope of shoring up the fragile four-month-old ceasefire and broadening his popular mandate for peace talks with Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has rejected as appeasement Abbas's efforts to bring militants into the political process. Sharon says he will not resume talks on Palestinian statehood until Abbas disarms gunmen and dismantles their organisations.

The United States hopes Sharon's plan to evacuate all 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza and four of 120 in the West Bank, starting in mid-August, may be a first step towards negotiations.

Hamas entered electoral politics for the first time at the end of last year, beating a corruption-tainted Fatah in a string of West Bank and Gaza town council polls widely seen as signalling future success in the parliamentary ballot in July.

In another sign of the challenges Abbas faces to his authority, Fatah gunmen demanding jobs in the police force blocked a Gaza road to the Egyptian border and detained a Palestinian diplomat for several hours.

Shaher Abu Eida, the Palestinian ambassador to North Korea, told Reuters by telephone he had not been harmed after being halted en route to Egypt. He later returned to Gaza City.

The 35 armed men, many of them masked, belong to the Fatah Hawks group. After detaining the diplomat, the men held talks with security officials and gave them a list of 200 candidates for police positions which the officials promised to review, the spokesman said.