09 March 2007

A Palestinian unity government is "99 percent" agreed, but will not be announced until next week, President Mahmoud Abbas said on Thursday after talks with Premier Ismail Haniyya.

On the ground, thousands of Palestinians tried to force their way through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt on Thursday in a melee in which one man suffered a fatal heart attack and five people were wounded by gunfire, medics said.

Following Saudi mediation, Hamas and Abbas' Fatah movement agreed a month ago to forge a coalition cabinet in a bid to halt weeks of bloody factional fighting that cost more than 90 lives.

"We have finished 99 percent of the issues of [forming] the government of national unity," Abbas told reporters in Gaza.

The cabinet line-up is likely to be unveiled only after Abbas has met Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert early next week for talks which Palestinian officials say might cover extending a cease-fire with Israel from Gaza to the occupied West Bank.

Disputes between Fatah and Hamas over the posts of interior minister and deputy premier appear to have been resolved. An official close to the talks said Haniyya would pick one of two candidates approved by Abbas for the Interior Ministry.

A political source named the front-runner as Major General Jamal Abu Zayed, a former deputy chief of the Palestinian Authority's National Security Forces who took part in talks with Israeli counterparts over Israel's 2005 disengagement from Gaza.

The source said Azzam al-Ahmad, who heads Fatah's parliamentary bloc, was likely to become deputy prime minister.

Abbas indicated that Parliament could convene for a confidence vote in the new government the week after next.

"We hope that this will be an era of true national unity," he said. "The homeland is for all parties. The people have suffered a lot and we should alleviate their suffering."

Once the unity cabinet is formed, Abbas wants international donors to lift a diplomatic and financial boycott.

More than 165,000 Palestinian civil servants and other employees have gone without salaries or have suffered pay cuts as a result of the boycott.

Militants from Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades shot and destroyed the automated teller machines of four banks in the West Bank city of Jenin, a bank official said. The group said they did so to protest the cuts.

Olmert plans to ask Abbas to account for $100 million in Palestinian tax money which Israel transferred to him earlier this year, the prime minister's spokeswoman Miri Eisen said on Thursday.

"We have heard the rumors [on how the money has been used]. The prime minister will ask Abu Mazen when they meet early next week," Olmert's spokeswoman Eisen said, using the Abbas' nickname.

In Brussels, EU's foreign policy chief Javier Solana reiterated international demands for a new unity government to clearly state that it recognizes Israel.

"There are many ways whereby you can express the recognition of Israel," Solana told The Associated Press on Thursday.

"I am not going to define what is the manner that would be the most appropriate, that's for them to decide, but in any case it has to be sufficiently clear that statement can be read and not only imagined."

In an interview before an EU summit, Solana said the movement toward unity among the Palestinians was "a good decision"  but stressed that the EU would have to wait to see what the power-sharing deal would mean in practice before making any decisions.

In Rafah, some 6,000 Palestinians turned up Thursday at the Gaza side of the crossing, flocking to a rare opening of the frontier and creating a crush at the terminal that Palestinian security forces could not control. A 61-year-old man on his way to a medical checkup in Egypt died of a heart attack.

Palestinian border guards fired in the air and on the ground to push back the crowd, and European monitors suspended operations on the Gaza-Egypt track. Travelers were able to cross from Egypt to Gaza for most of the day.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said he met Wednesday with US, European and Israeli officials to discuss the Rafah situation. "If the border was open on a regular basis, you wouldn't see the scenes you witnessed today," he said. - Agencies