(Adds quotes, details) By Mohammed Assadi RAMALLAH, West Bank, June 20 (Reuters) - President Mahmoud Abbas, backed by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) executive, summoned the group's parliament on Wednesday to try to boost support for his newly formed emergency cabinet. Abbas wants the 129-member Palestine Central Council (PCC), long the main Palestinian legislative body, to supersede the newer, Hamas-dominated Palestinian parliament, a move that could allow him to keep in place the government he formed after Hamas's violent takeover of Gaza last week, analysts said. The parliament, the Legislative Council (PLC), has ceased functioning since Israel's arrest of dozens of Hamas lawmakers and the latest violence between Abbas's secular Fatah and the Islamist Hamas factions. The PCC has not met for four years. "The aim of today's meeting is to topple the coup plotters in Gaza," council member Ahmed Abdel Rahman of Fatah told reporters before the session began, referring to Hamas. It was the Central Council that set up the Palestinian Authority for the Gaza Strip and occupied West Bank, in a 1993 decision taken at Tunis, where PLO leaders including Yasser Arafat were once based. Many of its members still live in exile. Riyad al-Malki, information minister in the new cabinet, said Abbas would announce policy steps aimed at further distancing his government from the former unity cabinet Hamas still says that it heads. One of these steps would be the issuing of new Palestinian passports from the West Bank city of Ramallah from July, invalidating the current travel documents, Malki said. He said this step was taken after the passport office in Gaza was vandalised and "destroyed" on Wednesday. It was unclear how Palestinians from Gaza, largely barred from travelling through Israel, would reach the West Bank to obtain new passports. The council, dominated by Fatah, was also expected to express support for Abbas's new emergency government during its two-day session in the West Bank town of Ramallah, Palestinian officials said. Some Hamas officials are technically entitled to sit on the PCC but it seemed unlikely many would attend. "One of the main issues of discussion will be to reiterate the legitimacy of the decisions taken by President Abbas with regard to the bloody coup by Hamas," Ahmad Majdalani, a member of the council, told Reuters. Another PCC member said the body would also debate the possibility of moving up a presidential election in addition to a parliamentary poll now scheduled for 2010. The Western-backed Abbas said last week when he formed the emergency cabinet that he hoped to lay the groundwork for new elections but did not say when they could be held. Hamas has condemned Abbas's new cabinet and continues to consider a three-month-old unity coalition headed by Ismail Haniyeh as the legitimate Palestinian government.
