Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority announced that Palestinian elections had been cancelled two days after a Fatah contact said Mohammed Dahlan and Hamas may run on one list. The move stopped a political opening that had briefly brought Dahlan, Hamas and Marwan Barghouti into the same electoral discussion.
Cairo talks over one list
A senior contact in Fatah said Dahlan was trying to return to Palestinian politics and that talks between Dahlan’s representatives and Hamas officials in Cairo were serious and going well. The contact said: “I have news for you about the electoral coalition between Mohammed Dahlan and Hamas. They may run for the next election on one list”.
If that arrangement had held, it could have joined Hamas, Dahlan and Barghouti in a single coalition. Barghouti has spent the past 24 years in an Israeli prison, and he consistently tops the polls.
West Bank closures and checkpoints
The cancellation came while life in the West Bank was already being squeezed by closures. Israel announced a shutdown of the West Bank last week, and it shut all the checkpoints and gates into towns and villages during the Jewish holidays last month.
A Middle East Eye reporter travelling from Ramallah to a small nearby village spent the night in her car with her husband and two children after being stranded on the road. Forty of Bethlehem’s hotels were closed, Bethlehem was described as empty, and the tourism industry there was still struggling after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Palestinian politics in Ramallah
The sequence matters because the election process did not fade slowly; it was cut off soon after the Dahlan-Hamas discussion gathered momentum. Mohammed Dahlan, a Gaza-born aide to Mohammed bin Zayed who lives in exile in Abu Dhabi, was being discussed as part of a return to Palestinian politics at the same moment the Palestinian Authority drew the process to a halt.
For Palestinians in the West Bank, the immediate effect was political as well as practical: the campaign route narrowed, while roads, gates and checkpoints already shaped movement between Ramallah, Bethlehem and nearby villages. The unanswered issue is whether the Dahlan-Hamas coalition would have gone forward and what legal or political basis the cancellation used.
