AFP - Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah faction elected new leaders for the first time in 20 years on Monday, hoping they can invigorate a party weakened by internal rifts and its rout from the Gaza Strip by its Hamas rivals.
   
Vote counting started early Monday after about 2,000 delegates cast their ballots at a party congress in the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem, the first ever in Palestinian territory.
   
Dozens of Fatah members had to vote by telephone as arch-rival Hamas, the Islamist rulers of the Gaza Strip, prevented them from leaving the Palestinian enclave to attend the gathering.
   
Participants were anxiously awaiting the outcome of the vote to renew the 21-member Central Committee and the 120-strong Revolutionary Council, the main governing bodies of the party founded by iconic Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in the late 1950s.
   
"I am convinced there will be changes within the leadership and that the Palestinian people will feel this change in the near future," said Abbas aide Nimmer Hammad.
   
"Fatah today is no longer fractured and weak," he said of the once-dominant party that has been hit hard by infighting and corruption allegations.
   
Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority, exercised undivided power among Palestinians before it was trounced by Hamas in a 2006 parliamentary election.
   
And its power base has been limited to the Israeli-occupied West Bank since Fatah forces were routed from Gaza when Hamas violently seized power in the coastal strip in 2007 after days of deadly street battles.
   
The congress has re-elected Abbas as head of the secular movement and renewed its charter, effectively endorsing his political programme.
   
It stressed its commitment to a negotiated peace with Israel but stressed that the Palestinian people have a "right to resistance to occupation."
   
The resolution prompted angry responses from Israeli ministers, who complained that the charter meant there was no real desire to reach a compromise with Israel.
   
But the reaction was ridiculed by anti-settlement group Peace Now, which said Fatah's failure to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, adopt Hebrew as its national language or sing the Israeli national anthem at its congress was "a blow to the champions of peace."
   
"Those hoping the Palestinians were on the verge of joining the World Zionist Organisation and pledging allegiance to the State of Israel may be disappointed," said Yariv Oppenheimer, who heads Peace Now.
   
But an honest look at the convention, he said, shows signs of a "new Palestinian willingness to make peace with Israel."
   
The congress was also marked by bitter rows, with numerous delegates blaming the current leadership for the party's failures, and expressing anger of the lack of accountability over the past 20 years.
   
But former Palestinian internal security chief Jibril Rajub was upbeat.
   
"This congress amounted to some kind of peaceful revolution as it will democratically bring radical change to the Fatah leadership," he told AFP.
   
Rajub, top negotiator Saeb Erakat and Fatah's West Bank secretary general Marwan Barghuthi, who is in prison in Israel, are among the leading contenders for positions on the Central Committee which runs the party's day-to-day operations.
   
Fatah's former strongman in Gaza, Mohammed Dahlan, is also a hopeful even though he has fallen into disgrace after the Hamas takeover of Gaza.