Palestinian National Security Council (NSC) was reportedly revived as efforts accelerated on Tuesday to convene the national dialogue conference in Ramallah and Gaza simultaneously on Thursday.
The conference is aimed at considering ways out of the Israeli-Western financial siege imposed on the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and ending a dispute over mandates between the Palestinian presidency and government.
President Mahmoud Abbas met with representatives of various Palestinian factions in the West Bank and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh did the same with their representatives in Gaza.
Abbas met the representatives in his office in the West Bank town of Ramallah on Tuesday and discussed ways of ensuring the success of the two-day national conference.
Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), Aziz Dweik, attended the Ramallah meeting. The national dialogue was originally proposed by the PLC in a letter from Aziz to President Abbas.
At another meeting in Gaza City late Monday night, Haniyeh and Abbas's personal envoy, Rouhi Fattouh, reportedly agreed to revive the PNA's National Security Council, which has been paralyzed ever since the formation of the new Hamas government.
On Sunday Abbas declared that, “civil war is a red line which no one would dare to cross.”
Haniyeh on Tuesday voiced a similar pledge during a meeting with the Higher Follow-up Committee of national and Islamic anti-Israeli occupation groups and urged the incumbent and former ruling movements of Hamas and Fatah to show restraint and vowed there would be no civil war.
“I urge all our people to be calm and show more self-restraint,” Haniyeh told reporters after the meeting.
“Civil war is a term that does not exist in the Palestinian dictionary. I assure our people that these incidents can be overcome,” he said, adding: “I tell our people not to be worried, our people are united despite these painful incidents. We are facing a real danger and it is the Israeli occupation.”
Abbas, in Egypt Sunday, confirmed that the national dialogue conference will convene on Thursday.
The upcoming dialogue “is about unifying political positions” among rival parties, said Abbas.
Abbas' statement was confirmed by chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat, who said that the Palestinians are in a “critical” and “dangerous” situation due to the growing tensions between the former ruling Fatah movement and the incumbent Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas).
The conflict between Hamas and Fatah was “really a crisis” and it needed peaceful solutions, said Erakat.
Analyst Nicolas Pelham from the International Crisis Group said the prospect of an all-out conflict was a very real danger.
“Clearly, there is a danger of fully fledged clashes between Hamas and Fatah,” he told Agence France-Presse.
“Everybody is preparing themselves that the national dialogue is going to fail ... All sides are preparing for the possibility of a major showdown,” he said.
A young Palestinian soldier loyal to President Abbas told BBC: 'This is an ugly game … If this goes badly all of us could end up dead.'
However, Mohammad Dahlan, a senior Fatah official and once security chief in Gaza, told the BBC that he did not think it would come to civil war, because the interests of the nation would outweigh the interests of different groups.
But he admitted though that all the Palestinian groups faced a challenge that had not been seen before.