President Mahmoud Abbas postponed Palestinian legislative elections to September 11, 2027. The official news agency Wafa said the decision followed a meeting of top officials on Saturday. They claimed conditions in the West Bank and Gaza were not right for voting. This delay keeps current leaders in power for longer.
President Mahmoud Abbas has postponed what would have been the first Palestinian elections in nearly 20 years, issuing a decree to further delay voting for the Palestinian Legislative Council for almost another year.
According to the decree, legislative elections planned for next month will be combined with a presidential vote and set for September 11, 2027, Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency, said on Saturday.
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The long-awaited parliamentary vote was originally set for November 28, with a presidential election expected in early 2027.
The decree came after a committee of top Palestinian officials met on Saturday morning to discuss postponing the vote.
The Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) Executive Committee, which Abbas heads, said in a statement that conditions in occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were not conducive to holding elections, noting that Israel had not allowed election materials or international observers to enter Gaza.
Israeli interference, including military raids, settlement expansion and settler violence in the occupied West Bank, has made a fair vote in November impossible, Wafa reported.
The agency also cited Israel's systemic withholding of Palestinian tax revenues and its restrictions on electoral candidates and international observers entering Gaza and occupied East Jerusalem, as reasons.
As for Gaza, it said that the lack of progress on reconstruction and on deploying an international stabilisation force factored into the decision as well.
The postponement leaves entrenched Palestinian leaders unchallenged and threatens to further erode the Palestinian Authority's (PA) credibility among Palestinians and donor countries who fund it.
On Friday, the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gideon Saar, accused Abbas of "fooling the international community" by planning to cancel promised elections.
A source told the AFP news agency on Thursday that Palestinian factions, including Abbas's Palestinian National Liberation Movement - also known as the Fatah party - had agreed to hold a "national dialogue" before legislative elections and that they wanted to postpone the vote.
The last parliamentary elections held in the Palestinian territories were in 2006, when Hamas defeated Fatah, which dominates the PA. The split led to factional fighting and Hamas later seized control of Gaza.
Ninety-year-old Abbas won the last presidential election in 2005. His term should have ended in 2009, but he has ruled by decree since then. In June, he signed a decree calling for the presidential election to be held in early 2027.