Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas has announced legislative elections in Palestine after two decades. As part of an effort to ease international pressure and restore the democratic legitimacy of governance, he set November 28 as the election date through a presidential decree on Thursday (July 9) local time, Al Jazeera reports.
Under the decree, the vote is to be held simultaneously across all Palestinian territories, including the besieged Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. If polling goes ahead as planned, it would be the first general election for Palestinians since 2006.
The last legislative election in Palestine was held in 2006, when the Islamist resistance movement Hamas won a landslide, defeating President Abbas’s Fatah party. Political division between Fatah and Hamas has been acute ever since.
After a bloody conflict between the two sides in 2007, Hamas took full control of the Gaza Strip. Since then, the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza have run separate administrations.
Al Jazeera’s Ramallah correspondent, Nour Odeh, said the election announcement is the result of long-running diplomatic negotiations and international pressure. The United States, the European Union and other Western countries have long pressed Mahmoud Abbas’s government to reform the Palestinian Authority’s structure and restore democratic legitimacy.
Analysts say, however, that amid the current regional conflict and the volatile situation in Gaza, it will not be easy to organise a free and acceptable election across Palestine by November without first securing a reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah.
There is also uncertainty over ensuring voting rights for Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Whether Israel will allow voting there is seen as one of the biggest challenges to holding the election.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report