The Palestinian Court of Justice in the West Bank ruled on Thursday morning to postpone upcoming elections in the West Bank and Gaza, AFP reported, hours after a separate court in Gaza rejected a host of candidates from the West Bank’s ruling Fatah party.
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Al-Zahar said that the elections were cancelled for no reason.
Salah el-Bardaweel, a senior Gaza-based Hamas leader, said in an emailed press statement that Hamas rejects the court ruling, adding that “Hamas calls on Palestinians to reject the court’s ruling”.
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 nearly certain that the municipal elections will not go ahead as planned.
Earlier on Thursday, a court in Gaza invalidated five electoral lists belonging to Fatah. The elections would be the first to take place in Palestinian territories since Hamas won the parliamentary elections in 2006.
Official campaigning had been due to start in the coming weeks.
Therefore, Hamas said that it is sticking to the time of the elections which was announced by PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah without any consultations with Hamas or Palestinian factions.
The now suspended October 8 vote was not for Palestinian president or parliament, but for leaders to fill 3,818 seats on 416 municipal councils in cities and villages across the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The people in Gaza have not voted in 10 years.
The postponement of the elections also underlines the growing problem of Abbas’s own long-expired democratic mandate. Opinion polls suggest most Palestinians would like him to step down. The vote was seen a potentially important proxy to measure support for both Hamas, which has fought three wars in recent years with Israel, and Abbas, who is an unpopular leader.
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Hamas sat out the last municipal elections in 2012, which were only held in the West Bank, but the group apparently took Abbas by surprise when it agreed to participate in this year’s vote. “We hold Hamas fully responsible for foiling the election, starting with the unjustified petitions it filed”, Fatah spokesman Osama Al-Qawasmi said, accusing Hamas of using “private courts” in Gaza to block Fatah’s lists. Fatah blamed Hamas for the legal dispute.
