Palestinian former peace negotiator Abdel-Shafi dies

Tue Sep 25, 2007 5:43am EDT

GAZA (Reuters) - Haidar Abdel-Shafi, a former Palestinian negotiator who became a vocal critic of the Oslo interim peace accords with Israel, died on Tuesday in the Gaza Strip, his doctors said. He was 88.

Abdel-Shafi led a joint Palestinian and Jordanian team at the Madrid Peace Conference with Israel in 1991 and at peace talks in Washington over the following 22 months.

He quit as a negotiator in 1993, arguing the Oslo interim peace accords signed that year with Israel charting incremental steps towards Palestinian statehood failed to put restraints on Jewish settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank.

In 1998, he became the first member of the Palestinian parliament to resign from the body, charging it was largely powerless, in a move widely seen as critical of the leadership of Yasser Arafat.

Rival Palestinian factions, in a rare show of unity, issued statements mourning Abdel-Shafi's death.

Leaders of Hamas, the Islamist movement that violently took control of the Gaza Strip in June, and President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction said they would attend his funeral later in the day.

Hamas's government in the Gaza Strip said Abdel-Shafi was "one of the most important symbols of the Palestinian people and their historic struggle to regain their legitimate rights".