Fatah, Hamas agree to hold elections in Palestine

Fatah and Hamas, two of the biggest Palestinian groups, have agreed to hold the first elections in Palestine in nearly 15 years.

Polls will be scheduled within six months under a deal agreed by Fatah, Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas political chief Ismail Haniya.

The last Palestinian parliamentary elections were held in 2006 when Hamas won by an unexpected landslide.
The deal was reached during meetings held in Turkey.

A meeting of the general secretaries of the factions will soon be held to announce the details of the agreement while also discussing the working mechanism until the elections are held.

Following the 2006 polls, Hamas and Fatah formed a unity government but it soon collapsed and bloody clashes erupted in the Gaza Strip between the two factions the following year.

Hamas has since ruled Gaza, while Fatah has run the PA, based in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah.

Numerous attempts at reconciliation, including a prisoner exchange agreement in 2012 and a short-lived unity government two years later, have failed to close the rift.

The talks in Turkey come after Abbas asked Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to support Palestinian reconciliation efforts with the aim to head towards general elections.

They also come in the context of efforts to unify the Palestinian ranks in light of the accelerated normalisation of ties among two Arab countries – the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain – and Israel.

The accords break with decades of Arab consensus that ties with Israel should not be normalised until it has signed a comprehensive peace deal with the Palestinians.