No peace for Israel in pact

TEL AVIV — Officials from Hamas and Israel dashed hopes yesterday that a Palestinian unity deal reached in the Saudi holy city of Mecca would end a crippling economic embargo or lead to a resumption of Palestinian-Israeli peace talks.

“Our battle with the Israeli enemy is still on,” Fathi Hamad, a Hamas leader in Gaza’s Jebaliya refugee camp, told thousands of supporters.

He urged militant groups to resume attacks on Israel and denied that Hamas would respect past peace deals with the Jewish state — a central element of the accord between Hamas and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas brokered by Saudi diplomats Thursday.

“We will be the spearhead of jihad … to defend Palestine and Arab and Muslim nations,” Mr. Hamad said, according to an Associated Press dispatch from Gaza.

Israel stopped short of a formal response, but Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told a security conference in Munich that Hamas remained dedicated to Israel’s destruction.

“Hamas is not using terrorism to build a peaceful Palestinian state but to destroy the other, to destroy Israel. … We cannot afford a terror state,” Mrs. Livni said.

In Israel, a top lawmaker in the ruling Kadima party said the accord falls short of conditions set by the international community to lift an economic embargo against the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.

“Abbas failed yesterday. He gave the Hamas a big victory,” said Tzachi Hanegbi, chairman of the parliament’s Defense and Foreign Relations Committee. “Regarding whether this helps the peace process, I’d say it’s a step backwards.”

Israel, the United States, Europe and other would-be Mideast peace brokers have demanded the Palestinian Authority recognize Israel and honor previous agreements between the two sides.

Despite fireworks and demonstrations between supporters of Hamas and Mr. Abbas’ Fatah movements to celebrate the Mecca agreement, Palestinians said they were worried that it would not end intra-Palestinian fighting that has grown increasingly deadly in recent weeks.

“There are fears that this agreement is only a superficial one, since it is difficult to clear all the bitter feelings towards each other in such a short period of time,” wrote Mahmoud El Battash in the Palestinian daily newspaper El Hayat Al Jadidah.

“As a result of this, another cycle of violence might erupt.”

Dozens of Palestinians have been killed in the past two weeks in street battles that made Gaza look as if it were deep into a civil war.

Mohammed Dahlan, a leading Fatah strongman in Gaza who was present at the talks, told the Arabic cable channel Al Arabiya that the agreement will be difficult to implement and that it was concluded under pressure from the Saudi government.

An adviser to Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, the top Hamas official in the Palestinian government, said that the Islamic militants don’t consider themselves obliged to carry out parts of the agreement that the Israelis have not kept.

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