One of the options we gave Hamas to speed up the reconciliation is holding parliamentary elections in January and then form a government, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat told AFP on Friday.
"This is only a suggestion and we haven't agreed on anything, but it is up for discussion, and we gave it to Hamas."
A Hamas spokesman Taher Al Nunu told AFP that "nothing was new regarding elections, which were one of the five clauses agreed on in Cairo, and their implementation is tied to implementing the rest of the reconciliation clauses. Elections can't be isolated from any other clause."
He did, however, stress to AFP that his movement "is definitely with the elections, upon which we agreed as part of the framework of the reconciliation."
Gaza's Hamas rulers are enjoying a surge in popularity following the release earlier this week of 477 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails in exchange for the freedom of soldier Gilad Shalit. Another 550 prisoners will be released within the coming two months.
The secular Fatah movement signed an unexpected reconciliation deal with its Hamas rivals in May under which they were to have set up a caretaker government of independents which would prepare for elections within a year.
But the agreement has never been implemented, with both sides bickering over the composition of the interim government and who should be at the head of it.
Holding elections in January would effectively remove the thorny issue of putting together an interim government.
Efforts to form a caretaker government were put on hold over the summer until after president Mahmud Abbas, who heads Fatah, submitted a formal request for state membership at the United Nations on September 23.
Local elections were to have taken place in the West Bank on October 22 but were postponed in August in what was the second such postponement this year.
The last time the Palestinians went to the polls was for parliamentary elections in 2006, which Hamas won by a landslide.
New parliamentary and presidential elections had been due to be held in January 2010 but the Palestinian Authority abandoned efforts to hold a vote after Hamas refused to organise one in Gaza.
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