Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas gives a speech during the Sixth Fatah Congress in the West Bank city of Bethlehem. (Khaleel Reash, Maan Images)

Reporting from Bethlehem, West Bank - Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas opened his Fatah movement's first congress in 20 years Tuesday with a call to step up nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation and to keep faith in peace talks despite years of setbacks to the dream of statehood.

But he stopped short of renouncing a clause of Fatah's founding charter that prescribes "armed revolution" against the Jewish state.

"Although peace is our choice, we reserve the right to resistance, legitimate under international law," he said, using ambiguous language that covers violent as well as peaceful action.

He said Palestinians must find consensus on "the proper forms" of resistance at any given time but made it clear that this is not the time for bloodshed.

Abbas spoke at the inaugural session of a long-delayed gathering to elect a new generation of Fatah leaders. The aim is to rally the secular movement, stigmatized by defeat and paralyzed by internal division, as a vibrant alternative to the Islamic militants of Hamas.

Abbas' position as Fatah chairman was not on the line. But as more than 1,800 delegates began three days of private debates, it was unclear whether the 73-year-old leader could hold together the movement founded by the late Yasser Arafat and recently nurtured by the West as the mainstream Palestinian champion of compromise with Israel.

The congress opened in discord, with about 400 delegates from the Gaza Strip absent because the territory's Hamas rulers had barred them from leaving. About 200 other Gaza delegates, who had left before the clampdown, showed up but threatened to walk out if the gathering held elections without the participation of their missing comrades.

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