Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas has threatened to break off a unity agreement with Hamas if the Islamist movement does not allow the government to operate properly in the Gaza Strip.
And prime minister Rami Hamdallah told AFP a dispute with Hamas over the payment of salaries to thousands of its employees had become the main issue from preventing his government of national unity from operating inside Gaza. Abbas's accusation that Hamas was effectively running a parallel administration in Gaza drew an angry reaction from the Islamist movement, which denounced his allegations as "baseless."
But it raised fresh questions over the future of a fragile intra-Palestinian unity deal aimed at ending seven years of rival administrations in the West Bank and Gaza. "We will not accept the situation with Hamas continuing as it is at the moment," Abbas said in remarks published by official Palestinian news agency WAFA. "We won't accept a partnership with them if the situation continues like this in Gaza, where there is a shadow government... running the territory," he said. "The national consensus government cannot do anything on the ground," he charged.