The news that the Palestinians' Fatah and Hamas parties had hashed out a deal on a unity government after months of wrangling and internecine fighting seemed to some too good to be true—and maybe it was. As The Economist went to press on February 15th, Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), had postponed the formation of the new government and was in talks with Hamas's Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister, to resolve a dispute over the running of the pa security forces, one of the keystones of political power.
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