Dahlan: ‘Chances of peace are zero’
Mohammad Dahlan, who played a key backroom role in a major new effort for Palestinian unity, has said a two-state peace agreement with Israel was impossible and healing wounds from a civil war that split Palestine was now a priority. Once of the fiercest foes of Hamas, the Islamist group that seized the Gaza Strip in a civil war in 2007, Dahlan, a member of the rival mainstream Fatah party, was interviewed after a unity cabinet held its first meeting in the enclave in three years. Dahlan said Israeli-Palestinian peace no longer within reach due to settlements (Photo: AP) “The internal Palestinian situation is more sacred, is more important and is more useful now than the so-called negotiation,” the veteran politician said of talks with Israel that collapsed in 2014 over issues such as Israeli settlement-building in the West Bank and Fatah-Hamas reconciliation. A former peace negotiator with Israel who speaks Hebrew and who was born in a refugee camp, Dahlan, 56, noted Jewish settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, areas captured in the Six Day War and which Palestinians seek along with Gaza for a future state. “There is a complete Judaisation of the West Bank, not only of Jerusalem. It has become impossible for the two-state solution to be implemented, therefore, there is no political horizon,” he said in the rare interview.
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