The indefinite court postponement of Palestinian municipal elections which were scheduled for Oct. 8 was a surprise move that reflects the continued tension between Fatah and Hamas. The elections would have been the first vote in a decade to pit Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, against its bitter rivals in Fatah, which runs the West Bank and is the party steered by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
The vote was not for Palestinian president or parliament, but for leaders to fill 3,818 seats on 416 municipal councils in cities and villages across the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The vote was seen as a potentially important measuring stick of support for both Hamas, which has fought three wars in recent years with Israel, and Abbas, the Palestinian president elected back in 2004 and who is now in the 11th year of a four-year term. Abbas has never named a successor and there is no public plan for what would happen if the 81-year-old were to leave office.
The postponement came after a Hamas-run court in Gaza ruled to remove the electoral list of candidates put forward by Fatah, leaving it with no candidates in Gaza. It would have left Fatah unable to compete in nine of the 25 races. The presiding judge said the suspension was also caused by a petition filed by Hamas protesting the inability of Palestinians in eastern Jerusalem to vote. The PA claims eastern Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, but Israel maintains sovereignty over the entirety of the city, thus precluding Palestinians in the area from voting in a PA election. If the elections cannot take place in Jerusalem and its neighborhoods, then they cannot take place at all, for they cannot be held in one location and not the other.
Had the elections been held, Fatah was likely to take the majority of seats in the local councils (3,818 in total across the West Bank and Gaza) while Hamas was expected to win in major cities like Hebron, Tulkarem and Nablus, through a candidate rotation agreement with Fatah. In the Gaza Strip, in at least four major cities in the enclave — Gaza City, Rafah, Khan Younis and Deir Al-Balah — there was the impression that Fatah’s electoral lists were more popular in light of the current deteriorating economic situation in the Strip.
Since the division in mid-2007, the year Hamas, buoyed by its 2006 parliamentary election victory, seized the Gaza Strip by force, driving out Fatah in a week of deadly clashes that neared civil war, the rift has undercut Abbas' claim to be a leader of all Palestinians and weakened him in past negotiations with Israel on Palestinian statehood.
Despite repeated reconciliation attempts, Hamas and Fatah have failed to bridge their differences and form a unified administration for the Palestinian territories. They have undergone several rounds of negotiations, and they signed agreements with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen and Qatar. But they all failed to achieve real reconciliation. The latest agreement was the Beach Refugee Camp Agreement on April 23, 2014, and the failed reconciliation meetings between Fatah and Hamas in Doha on June 18, 2016.
The Palestinian parliament has not met since 2007. The people in Gaza have not voted in 10 years. The West Bank held municipal elections in 2012, but many cities and villages did not participate, nor did Hamas, which boycotted the contest. So this election was being seen by some analysts as a sign of whether Hamas and Fatah could take a significant step towards reconciliation. Their divisions are viewed as among the key obstacles in efforts to restart Palestinian-Israeli peace efforts, at a standstill for more than two years.
The vote has been postponed until, at the very least, mid-December. Establishing a Palestinian national unity government that consists of all factions will just have to wait.
