Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas met in Doha on Tuesday with the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, against the backdrop of increasing tensions between the PA and Hamas in the wake of a security crackdown on Hamas’s members in the West Bank.
It also came amid an acute financial crisis in the PA, which has repeatedly appealed to Arab countries to fulfill their promises to support the Palestinians.
Qatar hosts several Hamas leaders, including Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal, and has been supportive of the Gaza-based Islamist movement for several years.
Attempts by Qatar and other Arab countries over the past 14 years to resolve the dispute between Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction and Hamas have been unsuccessful.
PA officials have frequently criticized Qatar’s financial and political support for Hamas, especially the delivery of cash grants to the Gaza Strip in coordination with Israel. The officials claimed that Qatar was emboldening Hamas, thus solidifying the split between the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Abbas was invited to Qatar to participate in the opening day of the FIFA Arab Cup. It was not clear whether he would meet with any of the Doha-based Hamas leaders during his visit to Qatar.
Abbas briefed the emir during Tuesday’s meeting on the latest political developments related to the Palestinian issue, and “ongoing Israeli violations and assaults on Islamic and Christian holy sites,” according to the PA’s official news agency Wafa.
The two also discussed ways of strengthening and developing bilateral relations in all fields, Wafa said, and that Abbas thanked the emir for Qatar’s continued support for the Palestinian people.
Abbas was accompanied by the head of the Palestinian Football Association Jibril Rajoub, chairman of the General Authority for Civil Affairs and member of the Fatah Central Committee Hussein al-Sheikh, and head of the General Intelligence Service Majed Faraj.
On the eve of the visit, Hamas officials accused the PA of launching a wide-scale security crackdown on Hamas members in the West Bank. On Monday, PA security officers arrested Islambooli Bdair, a Hamas activist from Tulkarm in the northern West Bank.
The officials accused the PA of beating Bdair in front of his wife and daughter during the arrest. Bdair was released on Tuesday.
Bdair was one of several Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad members rounded up by the PA security forces in the West Bank over the past few weeks. The crackdown has increased tensions between the PA and the two Gaza-based groups, whose representatives accused the Palestinian leadership of serving Israeli interests and acting against the “resistance” groups in the West Bank.