GAZA CITY, 6 September 2004 — Three hard-line Palestinian factions which boycotted the last elections gave their backing yesterday for plans to hold fresh polls in the West Bank and Gaza Strip next year. The Islamist group Hamas, the Islamic Jihad movement and the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) urged followers to register to vote in a bid to take advantage of disillusionment with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s mainstream Fatah faction. “Hamas is asking all the Palestinian people to register to vote in the elections,” the organization said in a statement. “We in Hamas regard elections as a way to lay the foundations for a community built on the pillars of freedom, stability and justice,” it added.
Palestinian officials announced on Saturday that they planned to hold simultaneous presidential, parliamentary and municipal polls in spring 2005. The Palestinians’ only legislative and presidential elections were held in 1996, two years after the launch of limited self-rule as part of the Oslo peace accords.
However those polls were boycotted by the three groups which rejected the Oslo peace process and are still committed to the creation of a Palestinian state that includes the land of Israel. Arafat, elected president of the Palestinian Authority in 1996, has come under heavy international and growing domestic pressure to reform his corruption-plagued administration.
But previous attempts to hold elections have bitten the dust with the Palestinians saying that Israeli closures in the occupied territories have made them impossible.
Although the statement did not specify that Hamas would participate in the elections, the organization has previously said that it will contest new polls. In the eight years since the last elections, Hamas’s popularity has outstripped that of Arafat’s Fatah movement in the Gaza Strip and the movement is keen to step into any vacuum created by next year’s planned pullout of Israeli troops and settlers from the territory.
Polls have also shown it is now running Fatah neck and neck in the larger West Bank. Senior Fatah MP Hatem Abdel Kader acknowledged that Hamas would give the party a real run for its money. “It’s true that Hamas is more prepared and better organized in the field ... but I’m still confident that Fatah will be the main winners,” he said.
However another senior Fatah member, speaking on condition of anonymity, voiced fears that his faction could face an electoral meltdown in Gaza. “There are real fears that Hamas will sweep the board in Gaza,” he said. “Fatah has not prepared at all and is consumed by internal affairs.”
While Islamic Jihad and the PLFP register only single digit support in polls, its leaders are also eyeing the elections as a platform to promote their agendas to a wider audience.
Khader Habib, one of the leaders of Jihad in Gaza, said his movement would definitely participate in the municipal and presidential elections but it had not yet taken a firm decision on the voting for Parliament.
A statement from the PLFP to its supporters also hailed the prospect of elections as an opportunity “to implement change and fight corruption.”
“We are calling for an initiative to start registering your names for elections and to observe your right to be a candidate for local and general elections,” it said.
Meanwhile, masked gunmen briefly seized the Palestinian governor’s office in a southern Gaza Strip town yesterday, demanding compensation for Israeli raids in a protest that added to signs of growing lawlessness.
The territory has been gripped by unprecedented turmoil amid demands for Palestinian President Yasser Arafat to enact anti-corruption reforms and a tussle for control ahead of an Israeli plan to quit the occupied Gaza Strip.
Gunmen took over the governor’s office in Khan Younis early yesterday to demand compensation from Arafat’s Palestinian Authority for destruction caused by Israeli raids. They left about an hour later after authorities promised to set up a mechanism to compensate Palestinian homeless.
