Palestinian leaders arriving in Mecca for talks to end conflict, find way to share power

(AP) Saudi Arabia brought the two main Palestinian leaders to Mecca, Islam's holiest city, on Tuesday to try to end their bloody conflict and complete a power-sharing agreement on a coalition government.

Before Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas left for the talks with Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, he warned that failure in Mecca "would mean the deterioration of the internal situation and igniting civil war," the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar quoted him as saying. "The word 'failure' is forbidden."

Mashaal and Abbas arrived in Jiddah, where they were due to meet King Abdullah, Crown Prince Sultan and Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal. The city is less than an hour's drive from Mecca.

The presence of the king and princes showed the kingdom's determination to repair the rift between Abbas' Fatah and Mashaal' Hamas. Four days of gunbattles between the two parties killed more than 30 people and wounded over 200 others until a ceasefire took hold Sunday evening.

Even as Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh left the Gaza Strip for the talks on Tuesday, Hamas and Fatah security officials fired at each other for 10 minutes at the Gaza-Egypt crossing terminal. No injuries were reported.

Haniyeh told reporters that his Hamas delegation was determined to reach agreement.

"Nobody wants the battling to continue," he said after crossing into Egypt. "The only beneficiary is Israel."

In recent months, Egypt, Syria and Qatar have all tried and failed to end the violent power struggle.

The Saudis are pointedly convening the talks in a guest palace overlooking the Kaaba, the black-draped cubic shrine toward which all Muslims turn when they pray.

Abdullah made clear he hoped the setting would have an influence when he issued a statement to the Palestinian community in Saudi Arabia.

"I hope that the Palestinian brothers hear your demand, and that they will not leave the sacred land without a commitment before God to stop fighting and bloodshed," the king said.

Kadoura Fares, a former Fatah Cabinet minister who met Mashaal last week, told Israel's Army Radio that Fatah and Hamas had overcome almost all the obstacles to forming a coalition government during talks in recent weeks.

"Hamas is willing to sign an agreement ... that the (new) government respect all the agreements that the PLO signed with Israel," Fares said.

But Moussa Abu Marzouk, Mashaal's deputy, was more cautious when he spoke shortly before leaving Damascus for the talks.

"The disagreements on forming a national unity government ... have become narrower," Marzouk told The Associated Press, "but we don't know whether an agreement will be reached or not."

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, in welcoming Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa to Moscow, expressed support for Palestinian unity.

"We hope that today's meeting in Mecca, to which we are sincerely grateful to Saudi Arabia who showed such initiative, will lead to agreements which will allow the cessation of confrontation between Palestinians and allow agreement over questions that are necessary in order to normalize life in Palestinian territories," Lavrov said.

The sides have been deadlocked since Hamas won the Palestinian elections in January 2006 and took control of the Cabinet and legislature. The West promptly imposed a financial blockade on the Palestinian government because of Hamas' refusal to renounce violence and recognize Israel and previous agreements signed between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel.

Abbas, a moderate who was elected separately in 2005, started negotiating with Hamas last fall in the hope that a coalition government would enable the West to lift the boycott and allow the return of aid money. By then, thousands of Palestinians had gone unpaid for months.

The talks broke down repeatedly, and street battles between gunmen of the two parties erupted with increasing frequency in Gaza. The differences focused on the program of the proposed coalition and who would control the security forces.

Ostensibly, the gaps are small _ in the case of the program only a single word. Abbas has insisted Hamas promise to "commit" to previous PLO agreements, including interim peace deals with Israel. Hamas is only willing to say it "respects" such agreements.

The underlying problem appears to be a deep mistrust and unwillingness to share power.

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Associated Press Writers Sarah El Deeb in Gaza and Joseph Panossian in Beirut contributed to this report.