March 1, 2024 (EIRNS)—Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said the talks Moscow sponsored among Palestinian factions have made progress toward establishing political unity under the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), according to an account in {The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/01/palestinian-factions-hamas-fatah-political-unity-talks-russia-sergei-lavrov). Speaking at a meeting in Türkiye, Lavrov said that Hamas had agreed to “respect the platform of the Palestine Liberation Organization,” but said actions rather than words would tell. The paper reported that the factions themselves had made a statement promising a dialogue in the immediate future with the aim of uniting them under the PLO banner—and presumably, its willingness to recognize Israel.
Lavrov had told the factions going into the talks, “If you announce … restoring Palestinian unity on the basis of the PLO program, it will remove the trump cards from the hands of those forces that refer to the internal problems in the Palestinian territories and use them to obstruct the settlement process in the Middle East.”
