Gaza crisis defers dispute over Abbas presidency

By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent - Analysis

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whose original four-year term expires on Friday, faces a legitimacy challenge that Israel's Gaza war has only postponed.

How it plays out will affect Abbas's ability to pursue peace talks with Israel. These have so far proved fruitless, earning him only derision from Hamas, which preaches armed resistance.

The Israeli onslaught on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip has temporarily eclipsed the dispute between Abbas's secular Fatah faction and its Islamist rivals over whether he must quit now.

"Currently we have a bigger problem than January 9," Gaza-based Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said. "Our priority is to fight this war imposed on us and to defend our people."

For his part, Abbas, who contends that legal changes mean his term ends in 2010, has deferred plans to set a date for parliamentary and presidential elections, which he hoped would pre-empt any Hamas effort to depose or replace him.

A senior Palestinian official in Ramallah said Abbas was now preoccupied with ending the Gaza war. Once a ceasefire was in place, he would ask Hamas to renew reconciliation talks.

"We demand democracy, we defend democracy and therefore whenever there is Palestinian reconciliation there will be legislative and presidential elections, together, at the same time," Abbas told a news conference in Madrid on Thursday.

But with Palestinian emotions raw, the conflict over the presidency has not gone away -- and may get more personal.

"Hamas officials are pointing their fingers at Abbas as if he was the one who decided to launch the war on Gaza," said Ihad Zahdeh, a 32-year-old actor in the West Bank city of Hebron.

"It's hard for Abbas to gain support because he can't do anything for his people in Gaza and can't stop the aggression. Is this what he achieved from peace negotiations with Israel?"

Mustafa Barghouti, an independent former presidential candidate, said Palestinians saw the Gaza war as one aimed at all of them, not just Hamas. Israel would thus wind up weakening the Palestinian Authority, rather than its Islamist foes.

"What happened in Gaza has exposed the struggle between factions for an Authority that doesn't really exist because it is under occupation," he told Reuters. "It deepened the feeling that we are all under occupation and must unify against it."

But Palestinian unity has proved elusive in recent years.

A governance crisis erupted after Hamas won a January 2006 election and widened when the group drove Fatah forces from Gaza 18 months later, leaving Abbas's Palestinian Authority in partial control only of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

"SENSE OF FEAR"