Saturday’s rally is not being held on the exact date of Hamas’s founding, but on the 25th anniversary of the start of the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada, against Israel.

“I hope God will make me a martyr on the land of Palestine in Gaza,” he said on seeing it.

“There is a new Arab presence, there is a different kind of support,” Meshaal said last week.

“We accepted (the idea), but not at the expense of recognizing Israel or giving away Palestinian rights, but as a common (Arab) factor,” he told Reuters last week.

Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas said on Tuesday it was time to seal a reconciliation with the Hamas terror group, which rules Gaza, AFP reported.

"It is time to seriously deal with reconciliation and for contacts with Egypt's mediation for a reconciliation," Abbas was quoted as having said at a meeting of the PA leadership attended by Nassereddine al-Shaer, a Hamas deputy premier.

"We hope to agree on a meeting and a meeting of the leadership in Egypt in order to finish with this question which has gone on for too long," Abbas, who heads the rival Fatah party, said, according to AFP.

There is a lot of support coming from the United Nations for Palestine at the moment and rightly so. Remember Hamas is the democratically elected party...

US officials exerted pressure on Egypt to prevent two senior Islamic Jihad officials from entering the Gaza Strip with Hamas’s political chief Khaled Mashaal, according to a report in the London-based pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat on Saturday.

The paper confirmed reports by Islamic Jihad, which said on Thursday that Israel had warned Egypt it would consider the three-week-old truce since Operation Pillar of Defense over if the terrorist group’s leader Ramadan Abdallah Shalah and his deputy, Ziad Nakhaleh, entered the Strip.

Israel also warned Egypt about permitting a third individual, Hamas official Saleh Al-Aruri, from joining Mashaal, who was making his first-ever trip to Gaza.