The Hamas-run interior ministry in the Gaza Strip said that it will ban the organisation of elections called for by Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas in the coastal territory.

“The ministry will hold accountable anyone involved in the elections,” the interior ministry said.

The ministry “rejects the holding of elections in the Gaza Strip because they were announced by someone who has no right to make such an announcement and because they came without national agreement,” it added.

Last week Abbas called for presidential and parliamentary elections to be held on January 24 after Hamas declined to sign on to an Egypt-brokered reconciliation agreement that was inked by his secular Fatah party.

Abbas issued a decree ordering elections in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, in a move seen by some as turning up the heat on the Islamist group to sign the deal.

Hamas - which trounced Abbas’s secular Fatah faction in the last parliamentary elections in January 2006 - rejected the decree as an “illegal and unconstitutional step”.

Abbas was elected in? 2005 for a four-year term.

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