By Nidal al-Mughrabi

Rival Palestinian factions agreed on Tuesday on steps aimed at ensuring Palestinian elections are held as planned later this year and pledged to respect their results, a joint statement said.

No Palestinian elections have been conducted in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem for 15 years amid a deep rift between President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah nationalist group and the Hamas Islamist movement.

The two dominant factions – Fatah holds sway in the West Bank, and Hamas rules Gaza – convened on Monday for talks in Cairo to prepare for parliamentary elections on May 22 and a presidential vote on July 31.

A joint statement at the end of the two-day session said both groups and 12 other Palestinian factions, including the militant Islamic Jihad movement, pledged “to abide by the timetable” for balloting and “respect and accept” the results.

There has been widespread scepticism the elections will even happen.

Many Palestinians believe they are mainly an attempt by Abbas to show his democratic credentials to new U.S. President Joe Biden, with whom he wants to reset relations after they reached a new low under Donald Trump.

At the Cairo talks, the groups agreed on the formation of an “election court”, with judges from the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, to rule in any election legal disputes, the statement said.

It said Fatah police would guard voting sites in the West Bank and Hamas police would deploy in Gaza, effectively freezing out more secretive security services whose presence might intimidate voters.

Fatah and Hamas also agreed to release detainees held on political grounds in the West Bank and Gaza and allow unrestricted campaigning.

Abbas, 85, announced in January the dates for the elections, and he is expected to run.

There are 2.8 million eligible voters in Gaza and the West Bank. The last ballot, in 2006, ended in a surprise win by Hamas in its first parliamentary elections. That set up a power struggle between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank.

in the meantime, Egypt opened on Tuesday its Rafah border crossing with the Gaza strip until further notice, Egyptian and Palestinian sources said, a move described as an incentive for reconciliation between the main Palestinian factions, meeting in Cairo.

The 365-sq km (141-sq mile) Gaza strip, controlled by Hamas, is home to around 2 million Palestinians. An Israeli-led blockade has put restrictions on the movement of people and goods for years.

Egypt had been opening the Rafah crossing for only a few days at a time to allow stranded travellers to pass.

The crossing was opened early on Tuesday and a bus carrying Palestinians arrived in Egypt, two Egyptian sources at the crossing said.

Rafah will remain open “until further notice”, one source at the checkpoint and an Egyptian security source said.

The Palestinian embassy in Cairo said Egypt had decided to open the crossing as a result of “intensive and bilateral talks between the Palestinian and Egyptian leaderships to facilitate the passage of Palestinians to and from the Gaza Strip”.

Palestinian sources attending the Cairo talks said they had been told by Egyptian intelligence officials that the move was designed to create a better atmosphere at the negotiations.

Egypt has tried in vain for 14 years to reconcile the two factions.