Palestinians to vote on recognition of Israel

RAMALLAH - President Mahmoud Abbas will hold a referendum on July 31 on a Palestinian statehood proposal that implicitly recognises Israel, after the Hamas government rejected the plan, officials said on Thursday.

Abbas will issue a decree on Saturday formally announcing the date, the officials close to the president said.

A referendum would be seen as a confidence vote on the government run by the Islamic militant group, whose election led the West and Israel to sever funds to the Palestinian Authority.

After initially calling the referendum earlier this week, Abbas gave Hamas a few more days to reconsider its position on a manifesto penned by Palestinian prisoners in an Israeli jail.

But the officials close to Abbas said Hamas had shown no sign of accepting the document, hence the president was going ahead with setting the referendum date.

"The Palestinian people in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip will be invited to take part in a referendum on the basis of the prisoners' document on Monday, July 31," one of the officials said.

He said the referendum would ask Palestinians one question: Do you agree with the prisoners' document or not?

Hamas officials were not immediately available to comment.

The referendum move could trigger more violence between Hamas and Abbas' Fatah movement, despite a deal to halt clashes that have killed nearly 20 people in Gaza in the past month.

"The referendum is a recipe for a civil war," Khaled Abu Hilal, spokesman for the Interior Ministry, told reporters earlier at a Hamas rally in Gaza before news of the date.

Around 10,000 Hamas supporters rallied across the Gaza Strip on Thursday against any referendum plan.

The militant group trounced Fatah in January parliamentary elections and has been locked ever since in a power struggle with Abbas, a moderate who favours a two-state solution to end conflict with the Jewish state.

Hamas rejects the manifesto and has said a referendum would be illegal so soon after the elections. It formally seeks to destroy Israel and replace it with an Islamic state.

The manifesto implicitly recognises Israel by calling for a Palestinian state on all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

Opinion polls show most Palestinians support the proposal.

Israel has dismissed the prisoners' document. It has long insisted on keeping large Jewish settlement blocs in the occupied West Bank.

But some analysts believe passage of the referendum would allow Abbas to sack the government as a means of lifting foreign sanctions imposed on the Palestinian Authority and of clearing him to pursue his plan for negotiations with Israel.

In Amman, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Jordan's King Abdullah he would do his utmost to restart peace talks with Abbas but that Israel would seek other solutions unless the Palestinians meet international demands to end all violence.

Israel plans to draw final borders with the Palestinians by 2010 if peace talks remain frozen. Olmert's plan involves uprooting remote Jewish settlements in the West Bank while strengthening larger enclaves behind a fortified border.

The Palestinians say such moves would deny them the viable state they seek in the West Bank and Gaza.

- REUTERS