Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will call an early presidential and parliamentary election if he fails to form a new government to replace a Hamas-led coalition boycotted by the West, a senior Palestinian official said on Saturday.
Yasser Abed Rabbo, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation's decision-making body, spoke to Reuters after the group deliberated how Abbas should proceed after he declared talks with Hamas for a unity coalition had hit a dead end.
GAZA: Two Palestinian parliamentary guards were wounded when demonstrators and parliamentary security guards exchanged fire at the Palestinian parliament building in Gaza City on Saturday, a lawmaker and medical staff said.
Some 1,400 uniformed police and other security officers demonstrating over the non-payment of their salaries stormed into the parliament compound while some fired into the air as slogans were chanted from loudspeakers. Hospital staff said the condition of the parliamentary guards, who were protecting lawmaker Ahmed Bahar of the governing Hamas group, was not serious.
"We view very gravely the attack against the Palestinian Legislative Council, whose aim is to create tension in Palestinian areas," Bahar said at a news conference. A similar demonstration in the town of Jenin in the occupied West Bank, which attracted more than 3,000 participants, passed quietly, witnesses said. At a clinic in the town of Al-Khalil in the southern West Bank, scores of women carrying their babies demanded that striking medical staff vaccinate their young. They said they had been waiting for months to receive the vaccinations.
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