BEIRUT: The Palestinian Authority’s Arab relations official Abbas Zaki said Tuesday in Beirut that the date for Palestinian National Council elections will be announced Thursday.

The former Palestinian Liberation Organization representative to Lebanon spoke to reporters at the end of a visit to the country to inform Palestinian factions and the embassy about “recent developments” in the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal are due to meet Thursday in Cairo to discuss implementing a Qatari-brokered reconciliation deal that was reached in Doha earlier this month.

Under the agreement, Abbas would head an interim consensus government, ending years of divisions between Fatah and Hamas. The government would supervise legislative and presidential elections.

Zaki said those brokering the agreement in Doha saw Abbas as a “competent person who could manage the situation for a transitional period,” adding that “we will announce the dates of the elections on Thursday.”

Zaki said Tuesday that regional changes including “the failure of the peace process” require “the re-organization of our internal house after several divisions that alienated different Palestinian factions in the recent past.”

He said the PLO is currently preparing for upcoming elections and so “it was essential for us to come to Lebanon and notify the relevant authorities in the Palestinian Embassy ... as well as different Palestinian factions, whether they are under the PLO umbrella or the opposition bloc, of recent developments.”

Zaki said he had met with Prime Minister Najib Mikati and President Michel Sleiman, as well as heads of political parties, and “we concluded that the Lebanese partners acknowledge and welcome reconciliation efforts.”

He downplayed the differences between Fatah and Hamas, saying that “Fatah did not drop the option of armed struggle,” offering as proof for this former Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s 1974 speech in which he famously said he held both an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun.

Zaki also cited 1974’s U.N. General Assembly Resolution 3236 that he said “stipulates the right of Palestinians to assume all necessary means of struggle including that of the armed struggle.”

However, Zaki said armed struggle should be assumed if it is useful, planned and not destructive, and damages opponents and not the [Palestinian] nation. “As for Hamas,” he said, “they have not limited their options with the armed struggle but they have called for a state within the temporarily set boundaries. So I believe we are ... closer in our stances than at any time before.”

He also touched on the ongoing Syrian crisis, saying “we [Palestine] are not even an independent state so [it’s] not of our interest to interfere in internal Syrian issues.”

He also spoke of Khader Adnan, the Palestinian prisoner who was in his 66th day of a hunger strike at the time Zaki spoke, protesting Israel’s so-called policy of administrative detention and alleged mistreatment.

Zaki said, “No one can imagine how this man can survive in light of the harsh conditions he is suffering from. Many of our detainees have passed away because of mistreatment in Israeli prisons.”

Zaki called it “ironic” that the international community, the Red Cross, and various embassies “spoke of the situation of [Gilad] Shalit, but no one speaks of this great man.” Shalit is an Israeli soldier who was captured by Hamas in 2006 and released in October last year in a prisoner swap.

After the press briefing, Zaki told The Daily Star that plans to develop a unified Palestinian security force in Lebanon are delayed in part because of the paralysis in the Cabinet.