Rival Hamas and Fatah factions reached a unity agreement Wednesday afternoon, the big success of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s nine-month Peace Talks that now have given birth to political Siamese twins, guaranteed to destroy the Palestinian Authority.

The outline of the agreement was reported earlier today here.

Hamas announced in Gaza, and Ramallah officials confirmed to the Bethlehem-based Ma’an News Agency, that peace between Hamas and Fatah will be finalized within five weeks, with elections to take place in six months.

Both rival factions agreed to release political prisoners that each side is holding.

Hamas and Fatah were unified in the Palestinian Authority administration until 2006, when the United States, as it is wont to do, blew it up by encouraging democratic elections that resulted with Hamas winning a majority in the PA legislature and making a fool out of then- U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Slightly one year after the elections, Hamas and Fatah waged all-out war in Gaza. Fatah’s American-trained troops, those who remained alive, scuttled out like scared rabbits and jumped backed into their foxholes in Ramallah while Hamas took control of Gaza and continue its successful effort to its subjects deeper into hell.

Previous unity agreements have fallen flat on their terrorists’ faces, but this time it doesn’t matter  because the announcement itself, less than a week before the official end of Kerry’s nine-month charades, leaves Kerry only being able to announce that he unwittingly really has succeeded in achieving a peace agreement. Given the upside-world today, it would not be a wonder if he gets a Nobel Prize for his efforts.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Jewish Home party leader Naftali Bennett reacted to the anticipated unity agreement with the most superfluous statements of the year.

Lieberman said, “It is impossible to make peace with both Israel and Hamas, a terror organization that calls for the destruction of Israel,” and Bennett called the unity an “alliance of terror.”

More interesting will be the reaction of the Obama administration, starting with Wednesday’s daily press briefing at the U.S. State Dept., whose spokeswomen certainly are meeting with Kerry to figure out to get out of the trap the entire administration has set for them by hardly even mentioning the word “Hamas” the past nine months.

As Kerry would say, “’Poof,’ and it is gone.”

“Poof” is gone, but Hamas is around and kicking, when it is not shooting.

Basem Naim, a foreign affairs adviser to de facto Gaza prime minister Ismail Haniyeh was quoted by The Washington Post two months as saying, “Any talks that do not take Gaza into consideration will fail. Obama sees Gaza as a side issue, and he believes that Gaza and Hamas are not at the center of things, because we are not participating in these negotiations. This reflects a kind of naiveté, for the success or failure of all efforts depends on Gaza.”

What, Obama naïve?

How could that possibly be?

He has a grand strategy, just like all his other failed strategies for a new Middle East. Kerry was to hammer out a “framework” for peace, entangling Israel into a web it could not get out of, and then bringing in Hamas with some fancy doubletalk to tie the noose. President Barack Obama, during his visit to Israel and Ramallah last year said, “If there is a model where young Palestinians in Gaza are looking and seeing that in the West Bank, Palestinians are able to live in dignity, with self-determination, that’s something that the young people of Gaza are going to want.”

As in the story of Purim, he made a noose for himself.

A new oil discovery in southern Israel might turn out to be the catalyst for an internal and self-destructive war in the Palestinian Authority, with Hamas in Gaza and chairman Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah likely to claim ownership of a new Israeli offshore oil discovery near Ashdod.

When the Tamar and Leviathan gas and oil fields off the Haifa and Hadera coast, in northern Israel, were discovered, Lebanon and Hezbollah quickly claimed that energy reserves were in their territorial waters.

The oil and gas reserves are clearly within Israel’s territorial waters, but the fields could extend as far as the waters off the Lebanese coast.

Lebanon warned the American Noble Energy company not to approach its territory, and Hezbollah it would go to war over the oil and gas fields. Since then, Israel has brought gas into production, and Lebanon and Hezbollah have kept quiet, partly because the United States has mediated by proposing a boundary between Lebanon and Israel’s maritime economic zones.

Now comes the Israeli Shemen Oil and Gas Company which reported on Saturday indications of  “high quality of oil”  following offfshore drilling at its Yam-3 well, 10 miles from the southern port city of Ashdod, located only a few miles north of Gaza.

The drilling reached a depth of 19,000 feet undersea, but the possibility of commercial production awaits further tests.

“This is good news for Shemen but it is still too early to pop the champagne,” Noam Pincu, an analyst at Psagot Investment House Ltd. in Tel Aviv, told Bloomberg News. “We have to see the results of the production tests to estimate the quantities and quality of oil at the site.”

It still is not clear from the drilling report how thick the reservoir is and how much much oil could be commercially produced. Analysts said it could be only a few barrels a day or it could be several hundred a day, which would bring in millions of dollars.

If the Yam 3 well turns to be commercially viable, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu might be able to relax at U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace talks and let Fatah and Hamas knock each other out.

Hamas and its rival Fatah movement likely would be at each other’s throats, literally, to claim that Israel is “stealing” the reserves from them.

Abbas was head of all of the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria as well as Gaza until Hamas completed a bloody military coup six years ago. Abbas dissolved the Fatah-Hams coalition government and declared himself as ruler of Gaza by presidential decree, which Hamas correctly terms as “worthless.”

Abbas and Hamas de facto prime minister Ismail Haniyeh have since failed to carry out several declarations of unity.

All it will take is a few barrels of oil near Gaza’s waters for both leaders to draw their knives and guns for energy reserves that are so close to Gaza that Haniyeh and Abbas can claim that Israel is “stealing” them by drilling diagonally into Gaza waters.

Both Ramallah and Gaza City are in serious trouble financially. Egypt’s new war on terror in the Sinai has choked off the flow of commercial goods through the border at Rafiah, and Abbas is totally dependent on the economically ailing European Union, to stave off bankruptcy.

The Hamas terrorist organization that suffocates Arabs in Gaza simply cannot understand how its once-upon-a-time benefactor Iran could support a dictator like Syrian President Bashar Assad.

“We never expected that a country like Iran, which talked about oppressed people and dictatorial regimes, would stand behind a dictator like Assad who is killing his own people,” Ahmed Yousef, an adviser to Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ prime minister, said, according to The Telegraph.

So who’s on first? If Haniyeh is a not a dictator, and if Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad  is not a dictator, that makes Assad a democrat. And if the bases are loaded with these lovers of freedom, who is going to being them home?  Al Qaeda?

Or maybe they simple will be stranded until their terror axis collapses from its own paranoia.

It was only two years ago that Hamas was headquartered in Damascus, where Assad provided a warm home for Khaled Mashaal, Hamas’ supreme leader. Iran supplied training for Hamas terrorists and shipped arms and explosives to Gaza, often through Syria.

The test of true friendship is fear.

When the fanatical Iranian Muslim regime  murdered and tortured thousands of its citizens who protested the rigged re-election of  Ahmadinejad four years ago, Hamas learned a lot from its trainers how to deal with anyone who dares calls a dictator a dictator. Make the people afraid of fear, especially those who never heard of Roosevelt.

However, when Syrians had the courage to take to the streets to protest, and then fight, against Assad, Hamas started to be afraid. Hamas so far has kept the lid on opposition in Gaza. It casually executes its citizens suspected of collaborating with Israel, and it routinely tortures activists in the rival Fatah terrorist party.

It follows fundamental and radical Islam and would be subject to upheaval if it were to back Assad an Alawite whose sect is considered by most Muslims to be apostates, slaughters tens of thousands of civilians.

Mashaal has long been exiled from Syria, and Assad and  Ahmadinejad are more dependent on each other than ever. If one falls, the other could be next.

The more Hamas took a position against Assad, the more Iran scolded Hamas, which had been receiving millions of dollars  a year plus great gadgets, such as anti-aircraft missiles and anti-tank rockets, to use against Israel.

Hamas’s deputy foreign minister Ghazi Hamad admitted to The London Telegraph last week that Iran has punished Hamas financially because of the terrorist organization’s opposition to Assad.

He said that relations with Iran are “bad” and added, “I cannot give you the exact amount. For supporting the Syrian revolution, we lost very much. I cannot deny that since 2006 Iran supported Hamas with money and many [other] things. But the situation is not like the past.”

Hamas also has a big problem with its political mother, the Muslim Brotherhood movement that brought Hamas into this world in 1987.

Terrorists from Gaza, many of them from rival terror gangs, are trying to keep a hold on the Sinai Peninsula and are keeping Egypt from exercising control.

Hamas is losing support, Assad is clutching on to Iran, whose economy is severely crippled by Western sanctions, and Iranian-backed Hezbollah is risking bringing down the house in Lebanon by shoring up Syria.

And what happened to the last Muslim friend of Assad who also saw he was headed into a dead-end? Click here to read about the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s price for egocentricity.

And who is Erdogan supporting in the Palestinian Authority? Hamas. A least he is consistent by siding with losers.

It takes one democratically-elected dictator to know another.

Egypt is urging Palestinian Authority PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to postpone elections while trying to convince the rival Hamas terrorist organization to drop demands for simultaneous presidential and legislative elections.

Holding elections at this time, which already is four years after Abbas’ mandate has expired, would torpedo efforts for a unity government, sauces told the Egyptian Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper.

The possibility of holding elections in Judea, Samaria and Gaza is virtually non-existent, according to the report. Sources also said that merging the Fatah and Hamas armies, both of which include terrorist units, would harm the process of reconciliation.

Hamas and Fatah underwent a bloody separation during a terrorist militia war in Gaza six years ago in which Fatah suffered heavy losses, leaving Abbas in charge of Judea and Samaria and Ismail Haniyeh as de facto Gaza Prime Minister of Gaza.

The resignation of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad marks a failure for U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, according to Tawfiq Abu Showmer, a Gaza-based political analyst.

Fayyad, educated as an economist in the United States, where he was on the staff of the Federal Reserve Bank, was hand-picked by the United States to head PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s government.

His moves to end corruption in the Palestinian Authority distanced him further from Fatah, the faction headed by Abbas, who accepted the resignation against the wishes of the United States. American influence may have been severely weakened by Fayyad’s’ resignation.

The Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian People’s Party (PPP) both see the resignation of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad as clearing the path for reunifying the rival Hamas and Fatah factions.

Bassam Salhi, the secretary of the a leftist-socialist PPP party, called for de facto Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh to resign to make way for a new unity government,

PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday accepted the resignation of Fayyad, who was handpicked by the United States to head the government several years ago. Fayyad learned economics at American universities and was considered an outside by the Fatah faction, headed by Abbas.

The Islamic Jihad also is optimistic that Fayyad’s departure will help reunite the Palestinian Authority. Khaled al-Batsh, a senior Islamic Jihad leader from Gaza, wrote on his Facebook page that Abbas should from a unity government as agreed on in Cairo in 2011.

Hamas PM Ismail Haniyeh left Gaza to Egypt on Saturday with a delegation of 21 senior Hamas members. Haniyeh is meeting with senior Egyptian security personnel.

The Hamas delegation are trying to improve relations with Egypt, which have been on a down-slide ever since the terror attacks began in the Sinai which many suspect are connected to Islamic groups in Gaza, as well as Egypt’s recent flooding and destruction of tens, and possibly even hundreds of Gazan smuggling tunnels.

Egypt also believes that Hamas was specifically involved in an attack that killed 16 Egyptian policemen last year in the Sinai (Rafah).

Al-Arabiyah claims that Haniyeh plans to talk about “Israeli violations of the truce” [between Israel and Gaza].

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, whom the Obama administration has praised for not publicly avowing violence like Hamas, may visit Gaza with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, according to the Bethlehem-based Ma’an news agency.

“I believe if Erdogan comes to Gaza, he may accompany president Abu Mazen,” Ahmed Yousef, former senior political adviser to de facto Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, told the news agency hours after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu apologized to Erdogan for the clash on the high seas in May 2010.

Prime Minister Netanyahu communicated to Erdogan “an apology to the Turkish people for a mistake that could lead to loss of human life.,” referring to the clash on the Mavi Mamara ship that was manned by Turkish terrorists who falsely claimed they were trying to take humanitarian aid to Gaza, where a maritime blockade is in force against terrorists.

After the clash, in which IDF commandos were brutally attacked before they overcame the terrorists, the ship was brought to Ashdod, where no humanitarian aid was found on board.

Hamas said on Friday that Erdogan told its leader supreme Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal that Israel had promised to lift the maritime blockade and the alleged “siege” on Gaza. Israel has opened up land crossing to almost all goods and merchandise except for those directly involved in terror, such as explosives.

Erdogan has stated several times in the past year he would visit Gaza, and doing so now, after Netanyahu’s apology, would be considered a swift kick in the butt in return for Israel’s exercise in appeasing Turkish anger over the deaths of nine of the terrorists in the flotilla clash.

If Abbas were to visit, it would also be a kick in pants of the Obama administration. President Barack Obama showered Abbas with praise during his visit to Ramallah last Thursday, taking pains to try to prove that Abbas, as opposed to Hamas, is a true “partner” for peace with Israel.