The Hamas premier in the Gaza Strip, Ismail Haniyeh, has been invited to the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Iran next week, his office said Friday, without saying whether he would attend.
"The prime minister has received a formal invitation from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to attend the non-aligned summit in Tehran," a statement from Haniyeh's office said.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who heads a rival West Bank-based administration, said last month that he had accepted an invitation to attend.
It will be Abbas's first visit to the Islamic republic. Haniyeh was there in February.
Iran is a backer of the Islamist Hamas, which has long been in conflict with Abbas's Fatah. Abbas has accused Tehran of trying to stymie reconciliation attempts between the factions.
In April 2011, Abbas's Fatah and Hamas announced a surprise reconciliation and agreed on the creation of an interim cabinet of independents selected by the two factions, which would prepare for elections to take place by May 2012.
But the deal has largely stalled, leaving presidential and legislative elections indefinitely postponed, although the Abbas administration has called for local authority elections in the West Bank in October.
Over the past few days, Tehran has sparked a fresh wave of outrage in Israel after Ahmadinejad and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei both described the Jewish state as a "cancerous tumor."
Israel and its ally, the United States, accuse Iran of seeking to develop an atomic arsenal, but Tehran insists its nuclear program is for civilian purposes only.
Israel, widely suspected to have the region's sole, if undeclared, nuclear arsenal, has warned that if need be it will attack nuclear facilities in Iran to prevent it becoming capable of producing nuclear weapons.
