The new leaders elected by President Mahmoud Abbas Fatah party's congress, who are reformists and seem to be different from their old guard predecessors, will apparently face serious challenges in the future with rival Hamas movement as well as Israel.

These challenges are related to ending the political and geographical rifts between Gaza, ruled by Hamas, and the West Bank, administrated by the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), establishing an independent Palestinian state through peace talks with Israel, holding the general elections in 2010 and the economical situation.

Observers believe that Fatah party, which was weak and suffered from severe disputes over the past 20 years, is now different and more unified after members of a new central committee were elected by the party's long-awaited general congress held in the West Bank city of Bethlehem since August 4, the first in 20 years.

The results of the 18-member central committee elections held on Sunday and Monday showed that 14 members are representing the reformers, or the young Fatah generation, who waited for several years to see this moment of the real change. Only 4 members from the old guard won in the elections.

"Finally, Fatah has made a great achievement by unifying itself and electing a new leadership, a good fact that has been awaited for a long time. But still, no one knows how this leadership will handle loads of complicated files and issues in the future," said Talal Oukal, an academic at Gaza al-Azhar University.

Future ties with Hamas

Right after he was elected as member of Fatah central committee, Gaza Fatah strongman Mohamed Dahlan, who fled Gaza Strip after Hamas seized control of the coastal enclave in June 2007, said, "we have so many missions. The most important one is to define the relationship with Hamas movement."

Two weeks ago, Hamas had mocked Dahlan when he said that he has an easy military plan, by which he can regain the Gaza Strip by force within one hour and a half. Hamas accused Dahlan of collaborating with Israel, and that "he wants to return to Gaza on a top of an Israeli army tank."

However, Oukal ruled out that Fatah central committee would one day make a decision to use military force in order to end Hamas rule of the Gaza Strip, expecting that bilateral dialogue between the two rival groups would continue under Egypt's mediation until a reconciliation agreement is reached.

"I doubt that Fatah will use military force against Hamas, but I expect that the new leadership of Fatah will show more hardline position in dealing with Hamas in any future dialogue by bringing Hamas to join presidential and parliamentary elections on time," said Oukal.

But senior Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar stressed earlier that Hamas wouldn't join any elections in the future before reaching a comprehensive reconciliation agreement and ending all kinds of political arrests against the movement's members in the West Bank.