GAZA: Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday postponed legislative elections to September next year, official media said, confirming widespread speculation that the polls would not be held on time.
Legislative elections, which the international community has strongly advocated for, have not been held since 2006.
The new polls had originally been scheduled for November 28, with a presidential election expected in early 2027.
But now the elections will be held alongside the presidential vote on September 11, 2027, Abbas said in a decree, blaming “obstacles” imposed by Israel, according to the Palestinian official news agency Wafa.
Israel, which will hold its own elections on October 27, had blasted Abbas’s Palestinian Authority as “corrupt” over the anticipated delay.
Abbas’s office, in a statement published by Wafa, attributed the delay to “obstacles imposed by Israeli measures that prevent elections from being held on their previously scheduled date, as well as the need to create appropriate political, security and on-the-ground conditions to ensure free, fair and inclusive elections.”
This week, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority said Israel refused to allow Palestinian election officials access to east Jerusalem or Gaza ahead of the legislative elections.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar on Friday had accused Abbas of “fooling the international community” by planning to postpone upcoming legislative polls.
Palestinian factions including Abbas’s Fatah party and its longtime Islamist rival Hamas had agreed to recommend the elections be postponed at a meeting in Cairo on Wednesday, a source who was present told AFP.
‘Fear of elections’
Esmat Mansour, a journalist and former official for the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), a leftist party, suggested that Israeli restrictions had been known at the time the elections were initially scheduled and were not the only explanation for the delay.
“The only thing that could explain this delay is your fear of elections. You are afraid of holding elections. You do not want people to have a say,” Mansour said in a Facebook video addressing other Palestinian factions.
But Palestinian analyst Ghassan al-Khatib disagreed, telling AFP he never expected there to be a vote because “Israel is making conditions that are not conducive to elections.”
“I don’t think that the internal Palestinian politics are the reason for the postponement,” the former Palestinian Authority minister said, pointing to the devastation and ongoing bloodshed in Gaza, as well as Israeli military operations and settler violence in the West Bank.
East Jerusalem, which Israel occupied in 1967 before annexing it, also hosts a large Palestinian population that the PA says should vote in elections, but it accuses Israel of refusing to allow them to organize it.
Holding polls is part of the reforms demanded by the international community for the Palestinian Authority, including the European Union.
The last legislative elections in the Palestinian territories were held in 2006, when militant movement Hamas won. They defeated Fatah, which dominates the Palestinian Authority.
The ensuing rift set off a round of factional fighting, with Hamas later seizing power in the Gaza Strip and creating a territorial divide between Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza.
As a result, the Palestinian Legislative Council, which is the PA’s parliament, has not met since 2007.
Abbas won the last Palestinian presidential election in 2005, and his term should have expired in 2009, but he has since ruled by decree.
