By DPA,
Bethlehem (West Bank) : The Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas began its first party conference in 20 years Tuesday.
More than 2,000 delegates gathered in the southern West Bank city of Bethlehem for the three-day event.
Delegates are to adopt a new platform and re-elect Fatah’s two main decision-making bodies, the 21-member Central Committee and the 120-member Revolutionary Council.
The 2,267 participants include many who have travelled from exile abroad, receiving rare Israeli clearance to enter the occupied territory.
They filled a large auditorium in Bethlehem’s Terra Sancta college, in the historic centre of the biblical city, near the Church of the Nativity marking the traditional site of Jesus’ birth.
Fatah’s “young guard” hopes to elect a new leadership to pump fresh energy into the movement, which has faced difficult times since it lost parliamentary elections to its arch-rival, the radical Islamist Hamas movement – now in sole control of Gaza – in 2006.
Hamas refused to allow some 300 Fatah delegates from Gaza to leave the coastal enclave and attend the conference, demanding the release of its supporters from West Bank jails as a condition.
Abbas, on arriving in Bethlehem late Monday from the central West Bank city of Ramallah, condemned the Hamas’ refusal, saying that “on the eve of the conference, after 20 years, there is a lump in our souls that delegates from the Gaza Strip will not attend.”