President Yasser Arafat was to meet leaders of his Fatah movement today after promising Palestinians new elections.
Elections are among the reforms of the Palestinian Authority that many see as vital to peace with Israel, but a senior official said the voting question was not on the agenda of today's meeting.
Palestinian Information Minister Mr Yasser Abed Rabbo told reporters the president's session with Fatah officials would focus on internal issues which he declined to specify. He denied an Israel Radio report that the meeting was to discuss elections.
"It has nothing to do with elections. It has to do with internal issues," Mr Abed Rabbo said.
Mr Arafat is under growing pressure at home and abroad to allow elections overdue since the last vote in 1996.
Violence continued yesterday. A Palestinian gunmen entered a Jewish settlement in the West Bank and wounded a guard before being shot dead. The Israeli army said its troops also raided Jenin's refugee camp and arrested 24 people.
Palestinian lawmakers have urged Mr Arafat to approve elections by early 2003 and in the meantime slim down the Palestinian Authority government that has ruled parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip under interim peace deals signed during the 1990s.
Mr Arafat today said new presidential, general and local elections could not be held unless there was an Israeli withdrawal from occupied West Bank and Gaza territory.
Aides later clarified he meant an Israeli pullback from self-rule areas retaken since Palestinians rose up after talks on a final peace pact stalled in 2000, not from the entire West Bank and Gaza, captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.
Mr Arafat earlier this week raised the possibility of new elections - last held in 1996 - along with reforms to a system increasingly criticised as autocratic, murky and corrupt by Israel, many Palestinians and international officials like.
Palestinian lawmakers said the reforms should be carried out by early 2003. Israel has made an overhaul of Palestinian institutions a precondition for returning to peace talks.
Mr Arafat's condition raised questions as to whether he was rowing back from his pledge on Wednesday that new elections would be held as part of reforms in his Palestinian Authority which Israel, the United States and many of his own people demand.
But prominent Palestinian legislator Ms Hanan Ashrawi said Arafat was drawing world attention to Israel's stranglehold on Palestinian lands, where army checkpoints block free travel.
She said Palestinian legislators had set a timeframe for the elections in the declaration we are working on but we need the proper conditions, which require an Israeli withdrawal .