Two leftist Palestinian militant groups said yesterday they would compete for the first time in a parliamentary election in July after boycotting the last vote in opposition to an interim peace deal with Israel. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine linked their decision to Cairo talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, at which factions extended a de facto truce with Israel. The largest militant faction, Hamas, an Islamic group sworn to Israel's destruction, said this month that it would contest the parliamentary election for the first time, a move that could threaten the longtime dominance of Abbas' Fatah movement. The militant groups, behind a series of shooting attacks and suicide bombings in Israel during a 4-1/2-year-old Palestinian uprising, rejected the 1993 Oslo Accords which gave Palestinians a measure of self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza.PFLP leader Rabah Muhana said his group changed its stance because the Cairo talks made clear the Palestinian goal of achieving statehood and promised reform of election procedures. He said parliamentary representation could better enable his group to press for democratic change and an end to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which it captured in the 1967 Middle East War. Ramzi Rabah, a DFLP leader, said his group had changed its strategy in view of world backing for Palestinian statehood. "The situation has changed from Oslo. The whole world is now convinced that for peace and stability to prevail in the Middle East, a Palestinian independent state must be established," Rabah said.
Abbas' mainstream Fatah faction won 66 seats in the 88-member Parliament in the first Palestinian election in 1996, which was boycotted by groups that rejected the Oslo accords. The PFLP and DFLP together command less than five percent support among Palestinians, polls show. Hamas has the backing of a quarter to a third of Palestinians. Islamic Jihad, a smaller militant group that also denies Israel's right to exist, has yet to decide whether to contest the election. Abbas, a moderate elected on a platform of nonviolence to succeed the late Yasser Arafat, conducted the talks in Cairo this month that led to an agreement for continued calm, seen as a key step towards renewing peace talks with Israel.