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dpa
Ramallah
A recent agreement between the rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah on forming a national unity government is unlikely to lead to any breakthroughs, analysts said on Wednesday.
"It is just another agreement in a series of unity agreements that have never materialized," analyst Jihad Harb told dpa. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party and the Islamic Hamas movement have been holding talks for years to reunify the West Bank and the Gaza Strip after Hamas pushed Abbas' Palestinian Authority out of Gaza in a bloody conflict in 2007.
The latest agreement comes after three days of talks in~Moscow ended on Tuesday. Those talks reaffirmed the conclusions of a meeting in Beirut last week on the same topic. Mustafa Barghrouti, a top Palestinian Liberation Organization official, told The Jerusalem Post on~Wednesday that one addition to the Beirut agreement is an option for Abbas to act quickly on talks to form the new government, with a goal of elections in six months.
Harb, however, is not optimistic."Neither Fatah nor Hamas have any intention of making any concession as a price for national unity," he said."Hamas wants the government to pay for its employees without giving up rule on the ground."
The last agreement was in 2014, when the Palestinian factions agreed to form a national consensus government composed of only nonpartisan independents and hold elections by December 2015. However, whenever ministers from the consensus government attempted to rule in Gaza, Hamas would not let them, and instead maintained control over security forces and daily life.
