GAZA (AFP) -- Hamas accused Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas on Saturday of usurping power after he called presidential and legislative elections for January.

Abbas, whose term expired in early 2009, “must be tried for usurping power,” deputy Palestinian parliamentary speaker Ahmed Bahar told a news conference in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas on Friday called presidential and legislative elections for January 24 in the Palestinian territories including the Gaza Strip, in a move seen as pressuring Hamas into signing a unity deal.
The Islamist rulers of the battered coastal enclave issued a swift rejection of the move, branding it illegal and unconstitutional.
Abbas issued a decree inviting “the Palestinian people in Beit-ul-Moqaddas, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to take part in free and direct presidential and legislative elections on Sunday January 24, 2010,” his office said.
In the decree he instructed the election committee to prepare for the vote.
Abbas, whose presidential term expired in early 2009, had said he would issue a decree calling the elections, in a move apparently meant to press Hamas into signing a much-delayed unity deal with his Fatah faction.
Egypt has been struggling to broker a reconciliation agreement between the two main rival Palestinian factions for months, and this month proposed an agreement that would see new elections held in June next year.
Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum swiftly rejected the move, branding it illegal and unconstitutional.
The decree calling elections “has no value whatsoever from a constitutional point of view,” Bahar said, noting that Abbas's tenure expired in January.
He said Abbas was making a “deliberate attempt to make (Palestinian) divisions permanent,” by calling elections for January.
Abbas was elected on January 9, 2005, for a four-year term. The Palestinian Authority extended his presidency by one year so that the next presidential and parliamentary elections could be held on the same date.
Hamas has consistently rejected the extension granted to Abbas and does not consider him the legitimate president of the Palestinian people.
The Islamist Hamas and the secular Fatah faction led by Abbas have been at loggerheads for years.
Simmering divisions boiled over in June 2007 when Hamas fighters expelled Abbas loyalists from Gaza in a week of bloody clashes, seizing control of the impoverished and densely populated territory.
In the last parliamentary elections in January 2006, Hamas won over the previously dominant Fatah.
If Hamas signs the unity deal after he issues the decree, “we will issue another decree to conduct the elections on June 28,” Abbas said in comments made at a closed-door meeting with Egyptian newspaper editors.
Fatah and Hamas leaders have blamed each other for the delay in inking a reconciliation deal -- which is seen as vital to any resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
“Fatah completely supported the Egyptian proposal... but then Hamas put down obstacles to achieving a reconciliation,” Abbas told reporters in Cairo on Tuesday after meeting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
Hamas has blamed the delay in signing the deal on what it said were inconsistencies between the final Egyptian draft and what the Palestinian factions had agreed on in marathon talks in Cairo during the year.