RAMALLAH: The two feuding Palestinian factions risk sliding into a constitutional limbo if they do not come to some sort of an agreement ahead of a key election deadline.

As the Islamist Hamas and secular Fatah trade invective and accusations over the scuppering of a long-delayed reconciliation deal announced by Egypt last week, the cutoff date for calling a new vote is fast approaching.

Palestinian Basic Law mandates that a new general election must be called at least three months before the end of the sitting parliament’s mandate, which falls on October 25 this year.

Palestinian president Mahmud "Abbas must announce a date for elections before October 25 so as not to create a constitutional void," said Samir Awad, a professor of international relations at the West Bank's Birzeit University.

The constitutional limbo risks cementing the Palestinian rift into what Walid al-Mudallal, a political scientist at Gaza's Islamic University, said would be a "really serious division."

But less than two weeks before the key date, the rift between the two camps appears as deep as ever.

Just days after Egypt announced that the two main Palestinian factions would sign a long-delayed reconciliation deal at the end of the month; the leaders of the two camps took to the airwaves on Sunday to hurl invectives at each other.

Abbas, who heads Fatah, said Hamas was delaying reconciliation in order to solidify its "coup" in Gaza, while Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal called the president's legitimacy into question.

Abbas's four-year term expired last January but Fatah has cited provisions in the constitution that require presidential and parliamentary elections to be held together to justify his remaining in office.

"The two camps are moving further and further away," said Hani al-Masri, a political analyst in Ramallah, and the political capital of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Abbas's government exercises limited authority.

A possible compromise could be a new proposal by Egypt that would see Fatah and Hamas separately sign an agreement by October 15, with the other Palestinian factions signing up by October 20.

Under this scenario, Hamas and Fatah would not have to sign the accord in the same room, thereby saving face, and Abbas would call presidential and legislative elections for June 2010, a senior Fatah source told AFP.

Fatah has already agreed to the proposal and Egypt was waiting for an answer from the Islamists, another senior Fatah official said.

Hamas-Fatah tensions date back to the start of limited Palestinian self-rule in the mid-1990s when Fatah strongmen cracked down on Islamist activists.

They went up a notch in January 2006, when in a surprise election rout, Hamas beat the dominant Fatah to grab more than half the seats in parliament.

And in June 2007 they boiled over into a week of deadly street clashes and ended with Hamas routing pro-Fatah forces from Gaza, splitting the Palestinians into two camps, with the Western-backed Fatah in charge of the West Bank and Western-shunned Hamas ruling the coastal strip.

Observers warn that the split created by the Gaza rout was so large that even if the two factions sign a deal by the key October date, their rivalry will be far from over.

Their divide "is too big for a simple signature," said Bassam al-Salhi, the head of the small People's Party in parliament. "There is a real fear both for the future of Palestine and its democracy."