Hamas is to hand its response today to Egyptians mediating a Palestinian unity deal, a spokesman for the Islamist movement said yesterday without disclosing its position.
A Hamas delegation is to travel to Cairo on deliver the response, Fawzi Barhoum told AFP, while refusing to say whether the movement would accept the proposal.
The response "will be taken within a framework aimed at guaranteeing the success of the Egyptian efforts" to heal the deep rift between Hamas and the secular Fatah movement, Barhoum said.
Last Friday, Cairo announced that its mediators had delayed to an unspecified date their deadline for Hamas to sign the unity deal at the Islamists' request.
That came a day after Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah party presented a signed copy of the deal, which marks Cairo's latest bid to unite the bitter rivals.
Yesterday, Abbas said he would announce the date for the Palestinian elections today.
The embattled Palestinian president said earlier last week that if the two factions did not reach agreement he would call for elections on January 24 instead of the June 28 date in the Cairo plan.
Yasser Abed Rabbo, a key adviser to Abbas, warned that the Palestinian Authority would reject any new Hamas "condition, reservation or amendment" to the accord.
In that case, "we would have no choice but to go back to elections," he told a press conference in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Palestinian Basic Law mandates that a new general election be called at least three months before the end of the sitting parliament's mandate, a deadline which falls today.
Abbas's four-year term expired as president last January, but Fatah has cited provisions in the constitution that require presidential and parliamentary elections to be held together to justify his remaining in office.
Cairo has struggled for months to get Fatah and Hamas - which controls the Gaza Strip - to sign a national unity deal, but the two main Palestinian factions have repeatedly postponed the signing.
Egypt announced last week that the rival factions would sign the much delayed unity deal in Cairo between Sunday and October 26, but Hamas asked for a delay amid controversy over a damning UN report on the Gaza war at the turn of the year.