Arafat to meet with Hawatemah on August 23

A well-informed Palestinian source in Damascus said that Palestinian President Yasser Arafat will meet with the secretary general of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Nayef Hawatemah, in Cairo on August 23.

In a statement released in Damascus the spokesman for the front, Ali Badwan, said a meeting will be "shortly held in Cairo" following the current talks held in Ramallah in the West Bank.

Talks between the delegations of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Fatah movement, led by Arafat, are currently made in order to "rebuild the establishments of the Palestine Liberation Organization and to expand the dialogue process to cover all groups of the Palestinian people's forces."

Badwan expected that the meeting between Arafat and Hawatemah will result in a "new qualitative change" in building the Palestinian political map, on the hope of eliminating the state of division and partition and to surpass all unfair agreements signed between Israeli for Palestine's self-rule and achieving comprehensive and balanced peace based in theory and practice on the principles of the UN terms of references and resolutions in the framework of the final stage negotiations.

However, this is the first official meeting between Arafat and Hawatemah since the signing of the Oslo agreement in 1992. The two men shook hands in Jordan in February during the funeral of Jordan's late King Hussein.