Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, said yesterday that he hoped to reach a final peace agreement with Israel within a year.

“We hope to have a comprehensive peace with the Israelis within a year or even less than that,” he said. His comments came after he told the Israeli press that the Palestinians were under intense pressure to strike a pact before President Bush leaves the White House. Mr Abbas said that Mr Bush had told him he was determined to broker a deal. “I heard this with my own ears from the President himself and from Secretary of State Rice,” Mr Abbas told the Israeli daily Maariv. “They want to reach an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians in the next year.”

There has been a flurry of peace initiatives in recent weeks, resulting in a tentative Israeli offer of final-status talks. These could lead to the creation of a Palestinian state in Gaza and 90 per cent of the West Bank, with parts of Jerusalem as the capital.

Even as the moderate Fatah leader was speaking, however, Israeli warplanes went into action against militants in the Gaza Strip, where Hamas stormed to power last month. A commander of Islamic Jihad and two of his fighters were killed in the airstrike.

Blockade drains life from Gaza

The movement of goods into Gaza had been intermittent at best since Hamas won Palestinian elections early last year

Multimedia

• Pictures: Johnston is released

• Video: unarmed protester confronts gunman in Gaza

• Pictures: life in Gaza

Background

• Q&A: Hamas and Gaza

• 97 days and counting for BBC's man in Gaza

• Now war is with the enemy within

• The little girl trapped by a quirk of war

Related Links

• Motto still ‘victory or death’ for Hamas

• Arab League holds 'historic' talks in Israel

• Restricted Blair offers hope of distant peace

In the West Bank, a mentally ill Palestinian man was clubbed to death by an Israeli soldier after he tried to stab troops, Palestinian medical staff said.

Israel has focused all its efforts on reaching an agreement with Mr Abbas and his West Bank Government, while rallying the international community to isolate Hamas in the Gaza Strip until it renounces violence and agrees to recognise Israel as a state.

Hamas is furious at the “West Bank first” policy. Officials said that corruption and abuse of power by Fatah — which Hamas says forced it to attack Palestinian Authority security bases and seize outright power in June — could provoke an uprising in the West Bank. “There have been 750 cases of assaults on Hamas people in the West Bank in the last month and a half,” said Hassan Abu Hasheish, Hamas’s Deputy Information Minister in Gaza City. “If it continues, things will explode. That’s what Fatah did in Gaza.”

Fears of another uprising have so far been dismissed in the West Bank, traditionally a Fatah power base. But that could prove a miscalculation, the Hamas minister said. “They used to say the same about us in Gaza, that we were weak and outnumbered and don’t have the weapons. But strength is not calculated in just weapons and numbers,” he said. “Righteousness, being right, makes you strong.”

Mr Abbas was certainly weakened by the Gaza debacle, when his forces were routed in three days. Israel has authorised the transfer of at least 1,000 rifles to his Palestinian security forces in the West Bank to help to secure his authority, although similar weapons supplies in Gaza failed to bolster the police sufficiently and the guns ended up in Hamas’s hands.

Mohammed Dahlan, the Fatah commander who oversaw that humiliating defeat, resigned from his position as Mr Abbas’s national security adviser yesterday after being warned that he would be sacked if he did not do so.

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