Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan said on Wednesday that the party is preparing for what he called a “post-Abbas era”.

Hamdan, the Hamas official responsible for international relations, added that former lawmaker Mohammad Dahlan, Abbas’s main political rival, “was not and will never be” Hamas’s choice to succeed Mahmoud Abbas as a president.
Dahlan, who was expelled from the Palestinian Parliament in 2014 by a decision from Abbas, is currently supported by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.

Talking about Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s latest visit to Egypt, Hamdan said the group discussed reconciliation with Fatah, a possible Israeli military offensive against the Gaza Strip, and possible solutions for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Hamas has been in control of the Gaza Strip since 2007, after defeating the rival party of Fatah and ousting their forces to the West Bank. In response, Israel has imposed a very restricting siege on the coastal enclave leaving more than 2 million Palestinians facing critical humanitarian circumstances.

Since then, many attempts were made to reconcile the two parties, the latest one was in December 2017 brokered by the Egyptian intelligence, but no real change has been seen on the ground.