Ramallah - In a move bypassing parliament, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Wednesday he would ask a top Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) body to call for early elections. "We will call the Central Council to convene and issue the decrees with regard to the early legislative and presidential elections," he said in a speech to the PLO's Central Council.
The president did not say when the elections would be held.
Abbas' call comes in wake of his dismissal of the Hamas-led national unity government last month, following the Islamist organization's violent takeover of the Gaza Strip, and his subsequent failure to get an emergency government he set up ratified by the Hamas-dominated Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC).
Justifying his attempt to bypass parliament on the elections issue, Abbas said Wednesday that the PLO was the only legal representative of the Palestinian people.
He slammed Hamas in his speech, accusing it of "hijacking" the Gaza Strip during last month's takeover.
Earlier, speaking after meeting European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, Abbas said he would not deal with Hamas - who he referred to as "coup-makers" - until organization reversed the Gaza takeover.
Relations between Abbas' Fatah and Hamas became extremely tense after last year's legislative elections, when Hamas won a majority in the PLC.
Although the two movements agreed in March this year to form a unity government, their relations ruptured dramatically last month, when, in five days of savage fighting, when Hamas gunmen in the Gaza Strip routed their opposite numbers from Abbas' Fatah movement.
The fighting left the Palestinian areas politically divided between a Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip and the West Bank, where Abbas' appointed caretaker government, headed by political independent Salam Fayyad, is based.
Attempts to get the Fayyad administration approved by the 131-member PLC have so far failed.
Some 43 legislators, the vast majority from Hamas, are currently in Israeli detention, and those still free have demonstratively boycotted sessions aimed at ratifying the new government.
As a result, the PLC has been unable to muster the quorum necessary to meet in session.
