RAMALLAH, 16 April 2005 — President Mahmoud Abbas’ ruling Fatah party is considering postponing the Palestinian parliamentary elections scheduled for July 17, a leading Fatah member confirmed yesterday.
Qaddoura Faris, a legislator from Ramallah and former minister, cited procedural problems as the reason.
But some Palestinian observers said Fatah feared a major defeat at the hands of the Hamas movement, which last month announced it would participate in national elections for the first time.
Hamas’ participation may end decades of Fatah control over Palestinian politics.
The movement’s popularity has increased in the past four years of fighting with Israel. It governs an extensive social network in the Palestinian areas and has spearheaded what Palestinians call the “armed resistance” against Israel with scores of deadly bombings. The movement scored major victories in the first municipal elections held last winter in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in nearly 30 years.
Hamas now has 13 mayors in 26 West Bank towns which went to the polls in December and seven mayors in 10 Gaza municipalities which held local elections in January.
Other West Bank and Gaza towns are scheduled to choose their councils on May 5, while the third and last phase of the municipal elections are expected in the autumn.
Hamas boycotted the first Palestinian national elections in 1996 and did not participate in the Jan. 9 presidential race, which saw Abbas succeed the late Yasser Arafat.
Hamas refuses to recognize Israel and therefore wanted no part in the Palestinian Authority autonomous government — an outcome of the 1993 interim Oslo peace agreement which provided for mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO.
Faris, however, said that difficulties in passing the new Palestinian election law threatened to delay the elections.
The new law must pass its third reading three months before elections are scheduled, which means April 17, if the final date of elections is July 17. Unless the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) passes the law by tomorrow, “then elections will definitely be postponed”, said Faris, adding a PLC session has not yet been scheduled.
The election date is days before Premier Ariel Sharon plans to start Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
Sharon’s bureau issued an official denial yesterday of reports saying he planned a further unilateral withdrawal from Palestinian areas, just months after completing the pullout from the Gaza Strip.
After the evacuation of the Gaza Strip’s 21 settlements and another four in the northern West Bank “there will be no diplomatic moves except in the context of the road map”, a statement said.
The Israeli Yediot Aharonot daily, quoting sources in Sharon’s entourage, said Sharon intended evacuating more West Bank settlements in a second stage of his disengagement plan. At the same time, he planned annexing Israel’s main settlement blocks behind what it will consider its permanent borders, Yediot reported.
A poll published in Yediot, meanwhile, indicated that a 61 percent majority of Gaza settlers plan to oppose the evacuation from their homes.
Most of them, however, said they would do so passively, without using force. A representative sample of 402 Gaza settlers was interviewed for the poll.
In another development, a gunman infiltrated the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights from Syria and fired on Israeli troops yesterday in a rare flare-up on the border that the Jewish state blamed on Damascus.
The army said it captured the lone attacker, a 21-year-old belonging to Fatah, the Palestinians’ ruling faction, and that he told interrogators he had planned to abduct an Israeli soldier and take him back to Syria.
— With input from agencies
