The president of the Algerian Senate, Salah Goudjil, received on Wednesday a delegation of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, led by the head of the political bureau Ismail Haniyeh, to discuss the Palestinian cause after the signing last October in Algiers of a reconciliation agreement between the different factions.
After months of high-level meetings and two days of arduous negotiations, the factions, led by Hamas and the nationalist Fatah party, signed the “Algiers Declaration” in October, under the auspices of Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, with the aim of ending 15 years of division. An “unprecedented consensus”, said the president at the time, after countless failed attempts at reconciliation.
According to the chamber’s communiqué, Goudjil reaffirmed the importance of support for Palestine in the policies of the Algerian state and its “unwavering” position until the establishment of an independent state in accordance with international law, and called for the “scrupulous” application of the agreement. For his part, Haniyeh declared his movement’s adherence to this alliance and advocated the creation of a national front and a road map against the Zionist entity’s government and its policies.
He praised the role of the Algerian leadership, especially Tebboune, who “rallied the Palestinian ranks and put an end to the disagreements between brothers, with a view to focusing efforts on the recovery of the Palestinian people’s right to the establishment of their independent state with Jerusalem as its capital”.
At odds since 2007, when Hamas expelled Fatah forces from the Gaza Strip and which have since ruled each geographically separate Palestinian enclaves (Gaza and the West Bank, respectively), various mediators, such as Egypt and Qatar, have tried to intervene to end the division.
The most recent attempt was in 2017, when Fatah and Hamas announced, with Egypt as mediator, an agreement whereby the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), which controls the West Bank, would retake control of Gaza and legislative and presidential elections would be held, postponed ‘sine die’.
Algeria is ‘the only country that does not have narrow calculations in this regard, just as it supports the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people’, Tebboune defended during the signing of the Algiers Declaration.
Source : Atalayar