Salam Fayyad on Tuesday dismissed reports that he was thinking of stepping down as Palestinian prime minister after the Islamist Hamas movement rejected him as a candidate to run the new government.
The Fatah movement of President Mahmoud Abbas had insisted on Fayyad staying as prime minister. Abbas told a Lebanese television station on Monday that since he would name the new government, his only choice would be Fayyad, regardless of Hamas’s position.
The move caused concern that the national reconciliation agreement that Fatah and Hamas concluded on May 4, and which was supposed to result in a government of consensus, may not work because of strong differences over Fayyad.
