Exiled Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal urged the Egyptian and Jordanian leaders on Tuesday to boycott the resumption early next month of direct Israeli-Palestinian talks to be hosted by Washington.
"I appeal to President Hosni Mubarak (of Egypt) and (Jordan’s) King Abdullah II not to back these negotiations which are rejected by the Palestinians," Meshaal said in Damascus where he lives in exile.
Mubarak and the Jordanian monarch have been invited by the United States to join a summit in Washington on September 2 during which Israel and the Palestinians are due to resume direct peace talks after a 20-month hiatus.
"The results of these negotiations will be catastrophic for the interests and the security of Jordan and Egypt," and are aimed at "liquidating" the Palestinian cause, Meshaal said in a speech.
The political leader of the Islamist group that rules in the Gaza Strip insisted that the talks are only "the fruit of an agreement" between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Hamas formally rejected Washington’s call for direct Israeli-Palestinian talks to resume next month, immediately after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last Friday announced the September 2 summit.
"Hamas rejects the American call for the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations," spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said at the time.
"This invitation is a new attempt to fool the Palestinian people after the Annapolis experience, during which we were promised a Palestinian state within a year, but many years have passed and we are still at square one."
A re-launch of negotiations amid much fanfare at Annapolis in Maryland in November 2007 had produced no visible results by the time the talks collapsed when Israel launched its devastating military 22-day offensive on the Gaza Strip just over a year later.
Abbas too weak
Meshaal also said in a speech in Damascus that Abbas was too weak to stand up to Israel and negotiate a just deal at the talks in Washington.
"If the talks succeed they will succeed to Israeli standards and liquidate the Palestinian cause. They’ll give us parts of 1967 lands. They’ll draw the borders as they want and they’ll confiscate our sovereignty," said Meshaal, who lives in exile in Syria, along with several Palestinian leaders.
Abbas’s negotiation strategy has long been condemned by the Hamas Islamist group which seized control of the Gaza Strip from him in 2007 and is deeply hostile to Israel.
Hamas does not rule out peace talks with Israel if they realise what it considers Palestinian rights.
Hamas has said it could live peacefully alongside Israel if Israel withdrew from all Palestinian land it occupied in the 1967 Middle East War. Hamas’s 1988 founding charter, however, calls for the destruction of Israel and for restoration of all of British mandate Palestine.
"Our grievance, in a nutshell, is occupation. Our project is resistance," said Meshaal.
Meshaal asked Abbas and his Fatah faction to join Hamas in adopting a Palestinian strategy that does not drop diplomacy but concentrates on the "option on resistance and holding on to inalienable Palestinian rights."
He said Palestinian negotiators were not legitimate