GAZA – Hamas's leader in exile Khaled Meshaal is tired of policy challenges from the Islamist group's Gaza-based leadership and is not seeking re-election in a vote now underway, political and diplomatic sources said Sunday. Over the past five months, Hamas, which has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007, has been quietly holding a leadership ballot among activists in the territory, the occupied West Bank, Israeli prisons and in Arab and other foreign countries. Meshaal, who has led Hamas since 1996 from various Arab capitals, told a meeting of its senior officials in Cairo last week that he had no desire to remain its chief and his decision not to run in the election was final, said a source close to Hamas. “He (Meshaal) told them to pick another leader,” the source said. Meshaal and other Hamas officials have made no public comment on his future leadership or on the Cairo meeting. Earlier this year, Meshaal angered Hamas's Gaza-based leadership by agreeing that its main rival, the Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, could lead any future unity government. Egypt has brokered a reconciliation pact between Hamas and Fatah, which fought a brief civil war in 2007 that left the Islamist group in control of the Gaza Strip and Abbas in charge of the West Bank. But implementation of the pact, which envisages a governing partnership and new Palestinian elections, has been held up by the two sides' failure to carry out its clauses on the ground. Meshaal has also voiced what critics in Hamas saw as approval for Abbas's now-stalled talks with Israel, saying in 2011 that 20 years after a 1991 international Middle East conference, Palestinians were willing to give peace another chance. — Reuters
