GAZA CITY (AFP) - New PLO leader Mahmud Abbas sought to rally left-wing support for a Palestinian presidential election after failing to persuade the radical Islamist group Hamas to join the political mainstream.
Abbas concluded a series of face-to-face talks with faction leaders by meeting local heads of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in Gaza.
But both groups stuck to their guns that general elections -- not only a presidential race -- be held, refusing Wednesday to declare their out-right participation in the January 9 poll to appoint a successor to Yasser Arafat.
"We are against having just a presidential ballot without announcing a timetable for general elections because then we risk finding ourselves with obsolete institutions," said PFLP member Jamil Majdalawi.
Saleh Zeidan of the DFLP also called for legislative and municipal polls by March at the latest. "The elections must be general and not limited to a presidential vote," he said.
In talks with Abbas late Tuesday, the Hamas leader in the movement's Gaza stronghold, Mahmud Zahar, refused to contest the vote to replace the late Arafat or to halt attacks against Israeli targets.
While a Hamas boycott could ease the way for an Abbas election, it also re-exposes divisions over the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority (PA).
"The presidential election is illegal," Zahar said.
The smaller Islamic Jihad movement has also confirmed it will not contest the election, in keeping with its own rejection of the 1993 Oslo autonomy accords that paved the way for the creation of the PA.
Instead, three wildcard contenders jumped into the race on Wednesday, headed by former Hamas official Sheikh Talal Sidr who quit the movement in 1997 to become a PA junior minister.
Sidr told AFP that he was committed to Arafat's policies, while political science lecturer Abdel Sattar Qassem said he would focus on "reforms, fighting corruption and restoring security".
Ghassan Barham, a largely unknown lawyer, said he would run on a ticket excluding the United States from the peace process and demanding the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
By comparison Abbas, thought to have won the backing of the mainstream Fatah movement as its candidate, is seen as a leading moderate who has long argued against a military solution to the Middle East conflict.
Hailing the election and Israel's scheduled withdrawal from the Gaza Strip as an "opportunity", British Prime Minister Tony Blair reiterated his commitment to relaunching the peace process.
"Our determination is to make sure that we'll work with the Palestinians and others in the international community to put together the political, the economic and the security institutions of a viable state," he told MPs.
In France, Foreign Minister Michel Barnier urged Washington to help to establish a Palestinian state "as soon as possible".
Nevertheless, Hamas and Jihad played down the prospects of a new ceasefire.
Zahar said that a change of tactics could only be considered if Israel met a raft of conditions that Hamas knows is unrealistic.
"If the Zionist entity stops all aggressions, assassinations, occupations and releases prisoners, we can discuss what we will do," he said.
"It's not the time to speak about a hudna," senior Jihad official Nafez Azzam said.
Meanwhile, Palestinian officials were to head to Paris to ask the French authorities for the medical report into Arafat's death on November 11 amid rampant speculation across the Arab world that he was poisoned.
Prime minister Ahmed Qorei's office announced that a special ministerial commission had also been established to investigate the cause of death.
Doctors who treated the veteran Palestinian leader believe he died of a blood clotting disorder and ruled out poisoning, France's respected Le Monde newspaper reported Wednesday.
11/17/2004 - 17:59 GMT - AFP