JERUSALEM - Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniya is to visit Switzerland in May, the first official trip to Europe by the widely boycotted Islamist premier, a Palestinian source said on Friday.

“Prime minister Ismail Haniya will travel to Switzerland in May,” a foreign ministry source told AFP, adding that the exact date had yet to be decided.

“This visit follows an agreement between Palestinian foreign minister Ziad Abu Amr and the Swiss President Micheline Calmy-Rey,” the source said.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, from Hamas’ secular rival Fatah, this week wound up a European tour aimed at convincing the European Union to lift its sanctions against the Hamas-led Palestinian government.

Hamas is classified as a terrorist organisation by the European Union and the United States. Switzerland is not a member of the EU.

The diplomatic moves come after Hamas and Fatah last month formed a unity government with the express aim of ending the Western boycott as well as lethal infighting.

Calmy-Rey’s predecessor Moritz Leuenberger said last year that the EU had been too hasty in deciding to suspend aid to the Palestinian government.

“It would have been wiser to give Hamas a trial period and judge it according to its acts,” Leuenberger told Al-Jazeera television in April 2006.

Israel has in the past prevented members of the Hamas-led government from leaving the occupied West Bank to travel abroad, but Haniya resides in the Gaza Strip which has a border with Egypt.

During his European tour, Abbas warned the EU that the lack of funds caused by the bloc’s year-long suspension of direct aid would encourage extremism.

“We call upon the European Union to lift the embargo imposed on our people, whose continuation will only succeed in encouraging extremism,” Abbas said in Athens. “The Palestinian people must be assisted to live a normal life.”

The European Union was the biggest aid donor to the Palestinian government until Hamas came to power in March 2006.

The Quartet of Middle East mediators -- the EU, the United States, the United Nations and Russia -- then suspended direct aid to the Palestinian Authority.

Hamas’ armed wing on Tuesday said it had ended a five-month truce with Israel in response to raids that killed nine Palestinians. However, Abbas described the end of the truce as a ”rupture that won’t last.”