Palestinian elections postponed until at least December by court

Plans for Palestinian elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip next month have been plunged into disarray after a court in Ramallah ordered that the vote be postponed until at least December.

The municipal elections, scheduled for 8 October, which Fatah and Hamas had both planned to contest, had been seen as a key step towards ending the prolonged impasse in Palestinian politics, and the first step to long delayed legislative and presidential elections.

However, some in the Fatah movement, to which the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, belongs, view the prospect with deep trepidation, fearing a repeat of the 2006 election, when the Islamist movement Hamas won over large parts of the electorate, not least in its stronghold of Gaza.

Behind the scenes some Fatah figures have been pressuring Abbas to cancel or postpone the vote. Indeed, rumours have been circulating that a way will be found to cancel the elections.

The court in Ramallah on the West Bank, where Abbas’s Fatah movement rules, ordered the postponement following disputes over candidate lists, not least in Gaza where Fatah activists have complained of interference by Hamas.

A key issue in the postponement was the claim that Hamas-run courts in Gaza had annulled candidate lists in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, barring Fatah figures from standing for infringements including alleged “immorality” such as reported claims of a picture of one candidate dancing in a nightclub.

“Elections can’t take place in one place and not the other,” the presiding judge of the Ramallah court said in his ruling. “The election can’t take place in Jerusalem and its neighbourhoods. Also, there are problems with the formation of courts in Gaza … Therefore, the court decides to stop the election.”

In fact local elections in 2012 did proceed under exactly those conditions with polling taking place in a fraction of the West Bank’s 350 municipalities, and Hamas refusing to recognise the outcome.

A Hamas spokesman said it rejected the court’s decision. “This is a political decision,” the Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said. “We reject the decision to cancel the election and call on everyone to reject it.”

The court will hold another session to consider the issue on 21 September, but legal experts said Thursday’s decision was unlikely to be changed, meaning it is almost certain that the municipal elections will not go ahead as planned.

Sources suggested Abbas would not seek to intervene to overrule the court by decree to ensure the elections went ahead on schedule.

Official campaigning had been due to start in the coming weeks. The elections were seen as reflecting wider political rivalries in Palestinian society than the Hamas-Fatah split, including as a prism for the protracted and contested issue of who will succeed 81-year-old Abbas.

The dispute underlines the legal and political divisions between Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, which governs in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and Hamas, which has controlled Gaza since 2007.