OSLO, Norway (17th December) -- Norway's foreign ministry announced on Wednesday that the status of the Palestinian representative's office in Oslo would be upgraded to a diplomatic mission as part of an effort of the Scandinavian nation to support Palestinian efforts toward building a state.
The announcement came while Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad was in Oslo, where officials announced the coming international donors conference to take place in the city in April 2011. During the announcement the official said he hoped a Palestinian state could be established within the year.
Speaking after talks with Salam Fayyad, Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere, who heads the committee in charge of coordinating international aid to the Palestinians, did not give an exact date or venue for the meeting.
"We should all cling to the vision of 2011 being the year when we can see a new state on the world stage: the Palestinian state," he told reporters in Oslo.
"For that to happen, institutions need to be solid, governance needs to be transparent, security, schools, all these elements need to come in place," he added.
Fayyad meanwhile stressed the work done by the Palestinian Authority to lessen its dependence on international aid.
On the same day, a top Fatah official, Azzam Al-Ahmad said the party would not participate in further negotiations with Hamas after the talks later this month in Damascus.
Al-Ahmad, who heads the party's reconciliation team, said Hamas should sign the Egyptian reconciliation document. That remains unlikely. This week, on Tuesday, thousands of Hamas supporters filled the streets of Gaza City in a mass rally to boost support for the Palestinian resistance group on its 23rd anniversary, while the PA continues in the West Bank as an ‘Occupation-franchise’ in many respects. Cars and buildings were adorned in Hamas's trademark green colours, and flag-waving supporters clogged the streets to reach the rally, where Hamas leaders lauded the group's history of fighting Israel.
The large crowd cheered Hamas's pledge never to recognise Israel, as sonic booms blasted from Israeli jets overhead.
"Hamas has not failed, Hamas has not collapsed," Ismail Haniyeh, the group's leader in Gaza, told the crowd. "Hamas did not fail to bring together government and resistance."
Hamas has often been torn between its roots as a military group and a local government responsible for providing services to 1.5 million citizens.
While sticking to its logical rhetoric, Hamas has largely observed an informal truce since the murderous Israeli bombing and invasion two years ago. It remains in power, although the Palestine Peoples’ Party is, at least anecdotally, more popular with many Gazans. Hamas insists it is more popular than ever.
In a message distributed to news media on Tuesday morning, Hamas said it remains committed to destroying Israel, bringing back Palestinian refugees and seizing control of Jerusalem's holy sites.
"Anyone who gives up these rights is a traitor," it said - an apparent dig at Hamas's rival, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who favours a peace agreement with Israel, inevitably meaning yet more losses for Palestine. Simultaneously, in the West Bank, the PA ‘security’ militias carried out a widespread arrest campaign in the ranks of Hamas’ cadres and supports in West Bank cities and kidnapped 20 of them during raids on homes and a school.
In order to obstruct any attempt to celebrate the anniversary, the militias also summoned for interrogation hundreds of citizens thought to be affiliated or supporting Hamas throughout the West Bank.
Local sources in Al-Khalil city reported that civilians affiliated with Fatah faction and security militias raided and ransacked on Monday evening and Tuesday morning many Palestinian institutions, mosques, clubs and homes in the city at the pretext of aborting events that might be held on the anniversary of Hamas.
No more Jaw-jaw
On Wednesday again, Arab foreign ministers rejected any resumption of Palestinian-Israeli peace talks unless it was based on a "serious offer" guaranteeing an end to the conflict - which would include an immediate end to ‘settlement’ building, seeking a UN Security Council resolution against Israeli ‘settlement’ construction on Palestinian land.
Arab foreign ministers decided to "bring up the entire situation with the Security Council and to activate the follow-up committee's decision to bring up the issue of Israeli settlements again to the Security Council."
The Arab League wants "to obtain a decision that confirms, among other things, the illegal nature of this activity and that would oblige Israel to stop it," a ministerial committee meeting at League headquarters in Cairo said.
The ministers, in their final statement, also urged the United States, which has traditionally vetoed Security Council resolutions against Israel, not to obstruct its decision.
The Arab League ministerial committee on the so-called ‘peace process’ "sees that the direction of talks has become ineffective and it has decided against the resumption of negotiations," the League's chief Amr Mussa said.
"Resuming the negotiations will be conditioned on receiving a serious offer that guarantees an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict," he said, reading from a statement after the meeting.
Meanwhile outside the committee rooms, the reality of the tensions between Palestine’s Big Two takes flesh:
The Islamic Jihad Movement said that prisoner Faisal Khalifa is being exposed to excruciating torture at the hands of interrogators from the Palestinian Authority in Tulkarem city and demanded his immediate release.
The Movement added it received reliable information affirming that Khalifa, an ex-detainee in Israeli jails, is being tortured severely by the PA intelligence interrogators and prevented from seeing his family.
Khalifa was kidnapped on Tuesday 7th December by PA intelligence militias from a school in Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarem.
Islamic Jihad also said that the PA militias also refuse to release ex-detainee Rafat Hussein despite his poor health condition in addition to two others of its cadres jailed in solitary confinement in Juneid prison.
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