Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has named a temporary successor if his post is left vacant by his death or incapacity but has rejected calls to resign.
In a decree released late on Wednesday, Mr Abbas (89) appointed Rawhi Fattouh (75) to serve as interim president for 90 days. Elections for a new president should be held within this period unless there is a “force majeure” event preventing balloting from taking place.
Mr Fattouh is chief of the Palestine Liberation Organisation‘s national council, its decision-making body which has 700 appointed members from the worldwide Palestinian community. As head of the elected West Bank-Gaza Palestinian legislature, Mr Fattouh served as interim president of the PA for two months after the death in November 2004 of Yasser Arafat.
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Mr Abbas was elected for a four-year term in January 2005 and has held no presidential election since then. He has declined to appoint a deputy or propose a successor although he has had health issues for many years. He recently came under pressure from Saudi Arabia to take this step, according to the news agency Reuters. The United States has also urged Mr Abbas to prepare for a smooth transition as the Biden administration wants the PA to plan for a non-partisan Palestinian body to take over the administration of Gaza from Hamas once Israel’s war ends.
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In an opinion poll in September, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Centre for Policy and Research found that 84 per cent of Palestinians wanted Mr Abbas to resign, 15 per cent said he should remain in office and only 6 per cent said they would vote for him if he were to stand again.
Mr Abbas has been blamed for rampant corruption and mismanagement and held responsible for the rift with Hamas that divided the West Bank from Gaza. This began when Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian legislature in a January 2006 parliamentary election. The rift deepened when Hamas seized power in Gaza in June 2007 after a failed coup by the PA’s security chief in Gaza, Mohammed Dahlan. The legislature has not met since then and was dissolved by Mr Abbas in 2018. He reluctantly scheduled elections for May 2021 but they were indefinitely postponed.
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Mr Abbas has been castigated for ordering the PA’s multiple security agencies to co-operate with Israeli counterparts. The UK-based Middle East Eye reports that hundreds of Palestinian opponents and dissident students have been arrested by PA security forces. Meanwhile, they have failed to contain Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians or prevent Israeli expropriation of Palestinian land in the West Bank.
Palestinian commentators have expressed concern that the PA will not be able to prevent Israel from annexing all or parts of the West Bank once US president-elect Donald Trump is back in the White House.
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