Palestinian Prime Minister Ismael Haniya on Sunday revealed that the Emirate of Qatar undertook to pay the salaries of up to 40000 Palestinian teachers.
Haniya who met with the Emir of Qatar Sheikh Hamad Ibn Khalifa al Thani said the Emir also promised that Qatar would pay the salaries of Palestinian health workers in case the present international financial blockade persisted.
“I want to give the glad tidings to our people that his Highness the Emir of Qatar has undertaken to pay the salaries of 40000 who work for the education apparatus” Haniya told reporters in Qatar following a meeting with the Qatari Emir.
The undertaking is considered a significant boost for Haniya and the beleaguered Hamas-led government.
The good news drew a lot of comfort in the occupied Palestinian territories languishing under a draconian financial and economic blockade by the US Israel and the European Union aimed at punishing Palestinians for electing the Hamas Islamic movement.
Palestinian leaders hope that other oil-rich Arab states such as the United Arab Emirates Kuwait and Saudi Arabia would also undertake to pay the salaries of employees in other sectors of the Palestinian economy.
Haniya is slated to visit a number of other Arab and Islamic countries including Saudi Arabia Iran and Syria .
Palestinians hope that the alleviation of the acute financial crisis facing the Palestinian people will also serve t o mitigate the equally acute political crisis stemming from the failure of the main Palestinian political factions to form a government of national unity.
Haniya on Saturday rejected accusations by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that Hamas was responsible for the ostensible collapse of the Fatah-Hamas negotiations aimed at forming a national unity government.
“We were on the verge of reaching a concordance but Fatah reneged on what had been agreed upon” Haniya told Aljazeera television Saturday.
While recognizing there is a problem Haniya stressed that his government was the legitimate government of the Palestinian people.
Meanwhile several members of the PLO executive committee reportedly asked Abbas to “show some prudence and patience” with regard to his implicit threats to sack the present government and/or parliament in order to form a new government that would lift the crippling American-led and Israeli-enforced sanctions on the Palestinians.
On Saturday Abbas announced that talks with Hamas over the formation of a government of national unity government reached a dead-end.
Abbas said he would take action in the coming few days in order to help the Palestinians overcome the present predicament.
However Abbas has been warned that he didn’t have many choices as any new government he would form must be approved by the Palestinian legislative council which is dominated by Hamas.
Moreover Observes believe there are really no guarantees that Abbas’s Fatah party would win in case new general elections were held in the occupied Palestinian territories.
On Sunday Saeb Ureikat said that all that Abbas was asking the Palestinian government was to recognize all outstanding agreements between the former PA government and Israel .
Speaking during a news conference in Ramallah Ureikat cited the example of former Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser and Ayatullah Khomeini who had to respect international commitments made by the previous regimes of King Farouk and the former Shah of Iran.
He suggested that Hamas was legally bound to recognize all outstanding agreements and commitments.
However Uriekat failed to recognize the fundamental differences between the countries he cited and the peculiar Palestinian situation namely the fact that Palestinians don’t have a sovereign state and are actually languishing under a sinister foreign military occupation.
Ureikat denied that Fatah was pressuring Hamas to recognize the Israeli occupation saying that no Palestinian would recognize the occupation.
In truth however the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority had agreed to recognize Israel without a reciprocal Israeli recognition of a Palestinian state and without determining the political borders of the Zionist state.
