DAMASCUS: Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal has urged Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to stop seeking compromise with Israel but has offered him an olive branch, saying Palestinians must end their divisions.

Sounding conciliatory after raising the political ante against Abbas following his call for national elections last month, Meshaal said Hamas “stretches its hand” to Abbas’s Fatah faction to end divisions between the two sides undermining the Palestinian cause.

“Courage dictates that we, as leaders of the Palestinians, be frank with our people and evaluate what compromise has brought us, decide together to suspend or freeze the political settlement process and pursue our real national options,” Meshaal told a rally in the Syrian capital.

He said compromise with Israel, starting with the 1993 Oslo Accords, had failed to stop Israeli settlement expansion and brought Palestinians no closer to establishing an independent state in the land Israel has occupied since the 1967 Middle East War.

“Any leader who insists on the right of return for the Palestinian refugees and on restoring the land, even to the 1967 borders ... must know that the way to do this is not through negotiations or betting on the Americans but through holy struggle, resistance and national unity,” Meshaal said.

“Our hand is stretched out to reconcile with our brothers in Fatah and the Palestinian presidency to achieve our national project,” he said, but did not make any new proposals for reconciliation after Hamas rejected an Egypt-mediated deal.

Meshaal, who lives in exile in Syria, said Abbas’s decision not to run, caused “some embarrassment” to the United States, the main Western backer of Abbas and Israel’s chief ally.

Hamas said Meshaal this week met delegates from the Council for the National Interest, an independent US group advocating what it calls a more even handed US policy in the Middle East.

The delegation included Jack Matlock, a former American ambassador to Moscow.