Thursday, February 24 2005 12:19 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Ramallah: Beleaguered Palestinian Premier Ahmed Qorei finally won the dominant Fatah faction's approval for a revised Cabinet line-up, after days of wrangling with reformist supporters of new leader Mahmud Abbas.

"Fatah's central committee and the party's representatives in the Legislative Council have reached agreement on the make-up of a new 24-member Cabinet headed by Abu Ala," Fatah MP Mofid Abed Rabbuh said.

Principal sacrificial lamb in the new line-up was Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath, a veteran aide of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who made way for envoy to the United Nations Nasser al-Qidwa.

The new Cabinet will now be submitted to Parliament for approval today (Feb 24, 2005), three days later than originally planned, Abed Rabbuh said.

The decision appeared to put a seal on three days of on-off debates in Parliament as Qorei struggled to win support for a list of names that critics charged was not sufficiently reformist.

A planned debate yesterday (Feb 23, 2005) had been called off barely an hour before it was due to start as the Premier struggled to win support for his proposed line-up.

Parliamentary sources attributed the delay to Qorei's failure to persuade a majority of the council's 83 MPs to back his list of Ministers, which had already been radically rewritten.

Qorei was forced on Tuesday (Feb 22, 2005) to scrap his original line-up, which had included 15 Members of Parliament, and has come up instead with a radically different list dominated by technocrats and featuring only two legislators.