Palestinian residents of the West bank are scheduled to participate in new municipal elections on Saturday without the participation of the Gaza Strip controlled by Hamas movement. Over 1.1 million Palestinians are scheduled to participate in the elections to choose the members of 300 new municipal council.
According to a poll conducted by Palestinian Center for Political researches, about 42 percent of the Palestinian residents living in the West Bank will participate in the coming elections, as over 20 percent of them believe that the vote will pose a serious challenge against the Palestinian reconciliation between two rival movements of Fatah and Hamas.
The West Bank and the Gaza Strip — the two territories that would in theory form an independent Palestinian state — have not participated in an election together since 2006. The terror group Hamas has run Gaza since seizing control in 2007, while President Mahmoud Abbas’s more moderate, Fatah-led Palestinian Authority has controlled the West Bank. A near civil war erupted between the two sides with Hamas’s violent Gaza coup a decade ago, after Israel had unilaterally withdrawn from the Strip in 2005.
Their failure to reconcile is seen as a major obstacle to any settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Efforts last year to hold joint local elections failed as the two parties failed to bridge their differences. Saturday’s vote for some 300 municipal councils in the West Bank has been seen as yet another sign that reconciliation may be a long way off.
Hamas swept Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 but the international community refused to deal with any government in which it participated until it renounced terrorism and violence and recognized Israel and past peace agreements. Hamas has refused to do so, and remains committed to Israel’s destruction.
Abbas, whose term was meant to end in 2009 but who has remained in office with no election held, has grown unpopular among Palestinians, but he remains their leader in the eyes of the world. He met US President Donald Trump in Washington on May 4 and is expected to do so again when Trump travels to the Middle East later this month.
Speculation has intensified over who will eventually replace the 82-year-old, who has not publicly designated a successor. Hamas is considered a terrorist group, not just by Israel, but much of the West, despite recent attempts by the movement to soften its image.
In 2012, it boycotted Palestinian municipal elections, which also occurred only in the West Bank. The election on Saturday will involve 1.1 million voters. There will be 536 candidate lists with 4,400 candidates, the head of the electoral commission, Hisham Kheil, said. “Everything indicates that the vote should go well,” he said, while expressing hope that voters will show up at the polls.