Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniya on Tuesday rubbished any prospect of civil war amid fighting that has dragged his Hamas faction into a deadly power struggle with the once ruling Fatah party.
"The term civil war does not appear in the Palestinian vocabulary," he told journalists after talks with various faction representatives in Gaza City.
"I assure all the Palestinian people that we are capable of overcoming these events," said Haniya, whose government has become embroiled in deadly clashes with Fatah-dominated security officers and faces a crippling Western boycott.
Fighting between a new Hamas paramilitary force and security officers in broad daylight near the parliament building in Gaza on Monday killed a Jordanian diplomatic driver and wounded nine Palestinians.
Fatah blamed Hamas for sparking the troubles. The Islamists accused "suspect parties" of sparking the unrest in a bid to destabilise the government.
No progress was made in crisis talks brokered by Egypt and hopes are already waning for the success of a "national dialogue" to be chaired by Palestinian Authority president Mahmud Abbas with all factions, scheduled for Thursday and Friday.
The clashes were also condemned by the US State Department, which demanded the Palestinian Authority stem the violence, saying it was "troubled by this kind of escalation".
Three deadly shootings between Fatah and Hamas loyalists in the past two weeks, security chaos and assassination attempts have elicited repeated calls from the leadership of both sides to avoid a descent into civil war.
Israel has capitalised on the power struggle as proof that Abbas, who has failed to rein in militants, is too weak to conduct stalled Middle East peace talks, bolstering its premise there is no Palestinian negotiation partner.
Israel refuses to any dealings with Hamas unless the Islamists recognise its right to exist, renounce violence and abide by previous peace agreements.
But on the day that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was to hold his debut summit with US President George W. Bush at the White House, Haniya renewed his offer of a long-term truce, or hudna, with the Jewish state.
Speaking to liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, he said peace would prevail if Israel withdrew from the entire West Bank and east Jerusalem, both of which were captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
"If Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, peace will prevail and we will implement a hudna for many years," Haniya said during the interview.
Haniya would not say, however, whether Hamas was prepared to rewrite its founding charter which calls for the destruction of the Jewish state.
The Israeli ambassador to Washington, Danny Ayalon, poured cold water on Haniya's comments saying they represented "nothing new".
On the ground, Israeli troops Tuesday captured the West Bank chief of Hamas's armed wing during a raid in the West Bank city of Ramallah, the political capital of the Palestinian Authority.
Ibrahim Hamed, who had defied capture or assassination for the past eight years, was wanted for allegedly masterminding a series of suicide bombings which killed more than 60 Israelis and wounded hundreds more.
Hamas, which has been behind scores of bombings in the past decade, has staved off such attacks since agreeing to a period of calm in early 2005 and deciding to contest and then winning last January's parliamentary election.
In Washington, Bush was to host Olmert in a meeting focused on the stalled peace process and Iran's alleged attempt to acquire nuclear weapons.
The prime minister was to outline his plan to retain massive blocs in the West Bank that house nearly 200,000 Jews while recalling tens of thousands of settlers from parts of the occupied territory.
Olmert met on Monday with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
For the moment, Washington is said to view the roadmap - the Middle East peace plan which has already missed its target date of 2005 to create an independent Palestinian state - as the best way forward.
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