PALESTINIAN PRESIDENT MAHMOUD Abbas is expected to hold talks with Prime Minister Marouf Bakhit on the latest Mideast developments, an official said.

Abbas arrived in Amman yesterday from Egypt, where he held talks with President Hosni Mubarak.

The official told The Jordan Times the Palestinian president will brief the premier on the outcome of his talks with Mubarak and his meeting in Jericho this week with Israeli Premier Ehud Olmert. In Alexandria, Abbas insisted there would be no dialogue with Hamas until the Islamists return Gaza to his legitimate authority after seizing the strip in June.

“What Hamas did was a destructive operation which helped those who don’t want to see an independent Palestinian state,” Abbas told journalists after talks with Egyptian president in this port town.“There is no dialogue with Hamas until they go back on what they did and return what they took,” he said, reiterating that he himself had been elected as the legitimate president of the Palestinian Authority.

“They know what they took and they know how to return it,” he said of Hamas, whose fighters ejected Abbas’ Fateh faction from the Gaza Strip on June 15. Abbas’ words followed a similar declaration by Azzam Ahmad, the chief of Fateh’s parliamentary bloc, in the West Bank.

“To end the crisis, Hamas must end its putsch in the Gaza Strip and return this territory to the elected and legitimate President Mahmoud Abbas,” Ahmad told AFP in Ramallah.

“Afterwards, we will be able to sit down immediately and start a national dialogue,” he said.

Abbas fired Hamas premier Ismail Haniyeh and the rest of a unity Cabinet after the Islamists’ takeover of Gaza. Hamas has refused to recognise the move and Haniyeh still considers himself as the legitimate Palestinian premier. However, Haniyeh on Tuesday said he was prepared to “give up” his post in order for the two warring parties to reconcile.

Abbas has repeatedly ruled out any talks with the movement that overran security forces loyal to him in the territory. Israel, keen to support the moderate president in his standoff with the group whose charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state, has sealed off Gaza following the takeover, allowing in only basic humanitarian aid.

Several hundred Palestinians remain trapped in Egypt since the takeover. While Israel has allowed many of the original 6,000 stranded Palestinians to go back to Gaza via the Jewish state, no Hamas supporters will do so, fearing arrest. Instead, they await the reopening of the Rafah crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, the territory’s only international gateway that does not go via Israel.

The Alexandria talks follow Abbas’ meeting on Monday with Olmert in the West Bank city of Jericho.

That was the first time in seven years that such a high-level meeting has taken place on Palestinian territory. Abbas said he had also discussed with Mubarak a Middle East peace conference proposed by US President George W. Bush for later this year.

Expectations for the conference are low, as neither side can agree on how to proceed ahead of the meeting called in a bid to jump-start peace talks which have been dormant for more than six years. Abbas repeated the need for what he called “a real framework” for the creation of a Palestinian state to be discussed at the conference rather than the “declaration of principles” sought by Israel.

“That is something we do not want,” Abbas said. “We have a lot of declarations of principles.” Israel has said it does not plan to enter talks on core issues on a Palestinian state, something the Palestinians are adamant should be on the table.

At the security level, Israeli troops shot and killed three Hamas gunmen in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, ambulance workers and army officials said.

Palestinian medical workers said that Israeli soldiers had killed two Hamas gunmen near a major commercial border crossing with Israel in central Gaza.

An Israeli army spokesman said a force patrolling the border had shot and killed two militants after pursuing them into Palestinian territory. In a second incident, Israeli troops killed a member of Hamas’ executive force who was stationed at a roadblock near a border crossing in the northern Gaza Strip, residents and medical workers said.

The army said soldiers had fired at two gunmen who approached the border fence, hitting one of them.

On Tuesday, Palestinians exploded a bomb outside a major security compound occupied by Hamas forces in Gaza on Tuesday, the first such attack on the Islamic group since it seized the coastal strip in June, officials said.

No one was injured in the blast, security sources said.

Officials said that the bomb was thrown into a garbage container from a vehicle that drove by the compound, which was once a headquarters of Fateh forces.

“We are trying now to track the vehicle and uncover the identities of the attackers,” Islam Shahwan, a spokesman from Hamas’ executive force, told Reuters.

Security officials said that no group claimed responsibility for the attack.