The Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, is under growing pressure to postpone parliamentary elections scheduled for July, despite threats from Hamas to call off a four-month ceasefire if he does so.
The Palestinian election commission said on Monday it would not be ready to hold the ballot on time. It said it needed at least two months from the time a new election law was ratified to prepare for the vote. But Abbas has yet to approve legislation passed by Parliament last week, because it does not meet his demand for more proportional representation.
Some senior officials in the ruling Fatah movement have already urged Abbas to delay the vote for several months in the hope that Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip will reverse the party’s decline in support.
But Hamas has warned that it will view any postponement as a breach of the agreement which brought it into the ceasefire. In recent local elections Hamas took a third of the vote, and opinion polls show it can be expected to perform as well in the parliamentary ballot.
Late last week Abbas said there was no prospect of the election being delayed. ”I have no intention to postpone the elections. The parliamentary elections will be on July 17,” he told reporters.
But he first has to resolve the issue of the new electoral law.
He promised Hamas and other factions that half of the seats in parliament would be allocated by proportional representation. The law passed by Parliament last week provides for only a third of seats to be chosen by PR, because some Fatah MPs fear that more extensive change could cost them re-election and diminish the power bases of old guard legislators.
Abbas now has to decide whether to accept the law as it is or demand further changes, which would almost certainly ensure a delay in the vote.
The Palestinian leader’s aides say he wants to hold the election on time because it will clear out old guard Fatah MPs who have a grip on Parliament, and make way for a more reform-minded cabinet.
But Hamas officials suspect that Abbas may secretly favour a delay in the vote until after Jewish settlers leave the Gaza Strip, because it will allow him to claim that he is making political progress with the Israelis.
A Hamas spokesperson, Muhammad Ghazal, has accused Fatah of using logistics as a pretext to delay the vote. The Islamist party has already threatened to quit the ceasefire unless Fatah withdraws a legal challenge to local election results in three Gaza Strip constituencies won by Hamas.
The Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, Mahmoud Zahar, last week described the election dispute as ”a plot that was born in the dark, whose aim is to forge the will of the Palestinian people and rob Hamas of its achievements in local councils under the guise of a court ruling”.
There was further trouble for Abbas as the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, reiterated his refusal to compromise on the explosive issue of Jerusalem.
”I will never negotiate on Jerusalem,” Sharon told Jewish leaders in New York on Sunday night. – Guardian Unlimited Â