Abbas wins Western pledges, vows to control Gaza

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's emergency government, bolstered by Western promises to end a crippling aid embargo, vowed yesterday to exert authority over the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

President Abbas stripped Hamas of its representation on the national security council and told US President George W. Bush by phone that the time had arrived to resume serious peace talks, aides said.

"The government will pursue its jurisdiction over all parts of the homeland, regardless of what happened in Gaza," Abbas's Information Minister, Riyad al-Malki, told reporters after the new government met in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Mr Abbas formed the new cabinet last week in the West Bank after the Hamas Islamist group routed security forces dominated by his Fatah movement in Gaza.

It is unclear how much influence President Abbas's government can have in Gaza, now a Hamas fiefdom. Gaza and the West Bank are separated by 45 km of Israeli territory. President Abbas's forces are focused on trying to prevent any spill over of the fighting from Gaza to the West Bank, where Fatah holds sway under Israeli occupation and where Hamas has threatened reprisals.

"We still do not have a clear plan," Mr Malki said.

Asked how he would enforce the law in violence-prone Gaza, President Abbas's interior minister in charge of security, Abdel-Razzak Yahya, said: "I swear to God I do not know."

Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas has said he still considers a three-month-old unity coalition in which he is prime minister as the legitimate Palestinian government and accuses President Abbas of participating in a US-led plot to overthrow him.

Hamas officials in the Gaza Strip said they were pressing the kidnappers of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston to free him by the end of the day and hoped they would release him without the use of force.