The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) has decided not to participate in a proposed Palestinian government, after being approached by Palestinian leader Mr Yasser Arafat.
The movement cited doubts over proposed reforms to the Authority and the imprisonment of senior members as reasons not to participate.
Meeting with Arafat in the West Bank town of Ramallah Wednesday night, representatives of the left-wing resistance movement rejected an offer to participate in a future government as long as their "secretary general is detained in Palestinian prisons'', a PFLP communique said.
The head of the PFLP Ahmad Saadat, has been imprisoned in the West Bank town of Jericho since the first of May, along with four other PFLP members, as part of the deal that ended the month-long siege on Yasser Arafat's Ramallah headquarters in place since the army entered the West Bank's economic hub on March 29th.
The other four PFLP members were sentenced in April by a makeshift Palestinian court for assassinating the extremist Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi.
A sixth man Fuad Shubaki, whom Israel accuses of bank-rolling arms shipments, is also in the same jail.
The PFLP said that its refusal to participate in a Palestinian government was based on its doubts as to the significance of the reforms that Arafat plans to implement.
AFP