WSJ: Hamas holding secret talks with Fatah about teaming up under PLO

Doha-based Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and former chief Khaled Mashaal are in contact with top Palestinian official Hussein Al-Sheikh from rival Palestinian faction Fatah about an alliance under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Participating in the secret talks, which are seen as a sign of pressure on the beleaguered Hamas terror group, is also Mohammed Dahlan, a former Fatah apparatchik exiled from Gaza who maintains powerful links in the Gulf and Egypt, and former Palestinian Authority prime minister Salam Fayyad, the paper reports, citing Hamas official Husam Badran, also based in Doha.

Dahlan confirmed that he was involved in the talks, the latest in a long line of bids to conciliate Fatah and Hamas. All have been unsuccessful.

“I am no friend of Hamas,” he is quoted saying. “But do you think anybody is going to be able to run to make peace without Hamas?”

Mohammed Dahlan during an interview with The Associated Press in his office in the West Bank city of Ramallah, on January 3, 2011. (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed, File)

According to the report, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, ordered an end to the talks once he got wind of them. The disagreement underlines divisions between the goals of the Gaza-based group, which describes its raison d’etre as Israel’s destruction, and those of its Qatar-based politburo, who have seemingly shifted stances and are now open to a political solution.

“We don’t fight just because we want to fight. We are not partisans of a zero-sum game,” Badran is quoted telling the paper. “We want the war to end.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has argued that the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority is not suited to run Gaza after the war, given the points of agreement bet