Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Sunday he would call for presidential and parliamentary elections if a reconciliation deal is not reached with rival Hamas by the end of this year, a move Hamas rejected as "illegal and unconstitutional." Abbas told members of his Palestine Liberation Organization that he would issue a presidential decree early next year but did not say when the elections would be held. "If the dialogue with Hamas fails, early next year I will call for simultaneous presidential and parliamentary elections," Abbas said.
Hamas replied with: "We reject the calling of the elections because it is illegal and unconstitutional," spokesman Fawzi Barhum told AFP. "The law does not give any authority to the president on parliament and nobody can dissolve it before" elections are due in 2010, a spokesman for the Hamas administration in Gaza, Taher al-Nunu told AFP.
Hamas, which controls Gaza, won an upset victory in the last parliamentary elections in 2006 and pulled out of Egyptian-brokered unity talks with Abbas's secular Fatah faction earlier this month, accusing his security forces of rounding up its supporters in the West Bank.