Jubilant Hamas militants cemented their domination over Gaza on Friday but appeared to make conciliatory overtures to their Fatah opponents after a week of intense fighting that has effectively broken Palestine in two.
Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader in Gaza, called for new negotiations with the Fatah leader and Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and urged calm from his own gunmen after they had routed Fatah rivals and embarked on a wave of looting in Fatah offices and homes in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas also released 10 senior Fatah officials captured during five days of clashes that killed more than 100 people. Haniyeh also demanded the release of Alan Johnston, the BBC correspondent kidnapped in Gaza more than three months ago.
Last night there were reports that his captors had promised an imminent release, but these could not be independently confirmed. Haniyeh, sacked as government chief on Thursday as the Hamas revolt in Gaza climaxed, insisted he was still the legitimate prime minister on the basis of elections last year that Hamas dominated.
“No internal formula in the Palestinian territories will hold without national agreement and without respecting the legitimacy of the election,” he said.
Abbas defiant
Fifty miles away in his West Bank seat of power, Abbas presented a defiant front to the movement that has demolished his authority in Gaza, ignoring Haniyeh's claim to office and naming a replacement prime minister, Salam Fayyad, a moderate technocrat respected in the west.
Salam Fayyad - an economist, MP and former finance minister - is well known in western financial circles following an eight-year stint at the World Bank and six years as the International Monetary Fund's representative to the Palestinian Authority.
US embargo
Western governments, including the US and the EU, pledged their support for Abbas, speaking of him as a moderate leader.
US consul general in Jerusalem Jacob Walles told Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday that the US would lift the embargo on the new Palestinian government once it was formed, pan-Arab satellite TV al-Jazeera reported.
Walles made the pledge during his meeting with Abbas at the latter's headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, said the report.
Some officials hinted that Israel might unfreeze tax revenues worth hundreds of millions of dollars that it has withheld from the Palestinians.
Thousands of Palestinians gathered at a rally in Gaza City in support of the Hamas takeover.
Most approved of the defeat of Fatah, but many were also concerned about the future. In Ramallah meanwhile, Mr Abbas’s supporters put on a show of force on Friday to demonstrate that Fatah and the Palestinian Authority still controlled the West Bank.
Meanwhile, the Arab League of Nations backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and called on the rival Palestinian factions “to immediately halt internal fighting and stop shedding Palestinian blood” after an emergency meeting early Saturday.
Profile: New prime minister
Salam Fayyad - an economist, MP and former finance minister - is well known in western financial circles following an eight-year stint at the World Bank and six years as the International Monetary Fund's representative to the Palestinian Authority.
Born near Tulkarm in the West Bank in 1952, he was educated in Lebanon and Texas, and spent 20 years in the US. He returned to Palestine in 2002 as finance minister, working hard to stamp out official corruption.
After Hamas won elections in 2006, he rejected overtures to be prime minister. He returned to the finance ministry this year as part of a Saudi-brokered deal to establish the ill-fated national unity government. He is married with three children.
