Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas received a recommendation to postpone elections he scheduled for January and will accept the advice, a senior official said.

The independent Central Election Commission said it had advised Abbas to put off the election since the rival Hamas Islamist group ruling some 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip had warned it would not allow them to vote.

"We met today and we decided to tell the president, who called these elections, that we cannot have elections at the time he scheduled them," said commission head Hana Nasir.

Nasir said the commission had tried to persuade Hamas to allow it to come to Gaza to prepare for the election but was rejected by the Islamists, who are arch rivals of Abbas and his more secular Fatah movement.

The presidential aide said Abbas was expected to agree to these recommendations and put off the presidential and parliamentary polls which he had scheduled for January 24.

Postponement will avoid an election that was destined to cause a permanent split in the deeply divided Palestinian movement, as well as delaying the moment at which Abbas has suggested he might choose to withdraw from the presidency.

Abbas had set the election date after Hamas refused to sign a reconciliation proposal drawn up by Egypt after more than a year of frustrating mediation between the two hostile Palestinian factions.

The pact would have scheduled the elections for June 2010.

Abbas has said on several occasions he would be ready to postpone the vote if Hamas changed its mind and agreed to the reconciliation pact.

"HAND OF FRIENDSHIP" REJECTED

So far there is no sign the Islamist group intends to accept what Abbas on Wednesday repeated was the offer of his hand in friendship. A Hamas spokesman responded immediately to the gesture, dismissing it as a "maneuver."

Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri expressed no surprise at the postponement.

"This is a natural result because of the lack of appropriate conditions and it is evidence of the credibility of Hamas' position, which rejected the call for elections before a national consensus was reached," he said.

Abbas declared last week that he does not wish to run for a second term as president of the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, because he feels frustrated by an inability to move forward on peace negotiations with Israel.

He cited Israel's failure to stop all settlement building in the West Bank and disappointment with the United States over its failure to back the Palestinians demand for a freeze.

Addressing a rally in Ramallah to mark the fifth anniversary of the death of his predecessor Yasser Arafat, Abbas said that for peace talks to resume, Israel must recognize the terms of reference.

"We cannot go to negotiations without a framework. And we say the framework is UN resolutions, meaning a return to the 1967 borders," Abbas said, referring to Israel's borders on the eve of the conflict that changed the map of the Middle East.

Israeli, Arab and European leaders appealed to Abbas to reconsider, since he is viewed as their main partner for peace in any future negotiations.

An open-ended postponement of the elections would require the endorsement of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which Abbas heads. The PLO has the power to extend his term indefinitely.