The first elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council in twenty years have been postponed to September 11, 2027. The loudest applause for the decision by 90-year-old Mahmoud Abbas came from his chief enemy, and that strange applause holds the key to Palestine's future.
At exactly eight in the morning on October 7, 2026, the Palestinian Central Elections Commission opened the registration of candidate lists for the Legislative Council. The date looked almost like a mockery: the third anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel that set off the most destructive war in the history of the Gaza Strip. The registration window stayed open for three days. On Saturday, October 10, Mahmoud Abbas signed a decree postponing the vote, scheduled for November 28, to September 11, 2027, and combining it with the presidential election.
The reaction that Ramallah had apparently been expecting arrived that same evening. Hamas called the postponement "a step in the right direction." The leadership of Islamic Jihad endorsed it. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine had been pushing for a delay as early as September.
The elections were not buried by the enemies of democracy. They were buried by everyone at once.
The official explanation sounds familiar. The decree cites obstacles created by Israeli measures and the need to secure the political, security and practical conditions for a free, fair and inclusive vote. The day before, the Palestinian Authority reported that Israel had refused to let election commission staff into East Jerusalem and Gaza. All of this is true. But this truth explains the postponement about as well as bad weather explains a lost war.
Twenty Years Without a Ballot Box: How Palestine Forgot How to Vote
The Palestinian Legislative Council did not last long as a functioning parliament. The first elections were held on January 20, 1996, and the first session convened on March 7 of that year. The second Council was elected on January 25, 2006, and that day marked the end of Palestinian multiparty politics in the conventional sense. Hamas won 74 of the 132 seats, Fatah 45. Israel and Western capitals refused to recognize the Islamist government; a financial boycott followed, and then street clashes. In June 2007, Hamas seized Gaza by force, killing and expelling hundreds of Fatah supporters.
From then on, the parliament existed in two incarnations, and both were a fiction. In Gaza, Hamas lawmakers held sessions; in Ramallah, laws were replaced by presidential decrees. The final word came in December 2018, when the Constitutional Court formed by Abbas formally dissolved the Council. Abbas's own presidential mandate, won on January 9, 2005, expired in January 2009. He has ruled by decree for seventeen years and is now in his twenty-second year in office.
The figure Ramallah prefers not to say aloud is this. A Palestinian who turned eighteen in January 2006 is now thirty-eight or thirty-nine. Everyone younger has never once voted in a national election. That is the majority of the adult population of the territories.
The 2021 attempt only reinforced the reflex. Abbas called parliamentary elections for May 22 of that year, 36 lists were submitted to the election commission, and on April 29 the vote was canceled. The pretext was the same as now: Israel had not provided guarantees for holding elections in East Jerusalem, home to an estimated 350,000 to 400,000 Palestinians. The real reason was plain to see. Fatah had split into three lists. The official one was headed by Mahmoud al-Aloul; the second was assembled by Arafat's nephew Nasser al-Kidwa and Marwan Barghouti, who is serving time in an Israeli prison; the third represented Mohammed Dahlan, who had been expelled from the party. The polls promised Hamas victory over a fragmented opponent. Abbas chose Jerusalem as a convenient excuse.
An IOU for Macron: Who Made the Old Man Call Elections
Five years later, it was no longer Palestinians but foreigners leading Abbas to the ballot box. In September 2025, France recognized the State of Palestine, and part of the deal was a written commitment from Abbas to President Emmanuel Macron and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to hold presidential and parliamentary elections. Recognition required a legitimate counterpart. A man whose mandate had expired in 2009 could not qualify.
What followed was a series of decrees revealing just how improvised the process was. In June 2026, Abbas signed a decree on presidential elections in early 2027 and at the same time expanded the Legislative Council to 200 seats. On July 9, a decree set the parliamentary vote for November 28. On August 11, a new decree-law restored the parliament to its previous 132 seats. The electoral system remained fully proportional, with closed lists and no single-member districts: each list had to include between 16 and 132 candidates. One man changed the structure of an entire people's legislature three times in two months.
On September 24, Abbas reaffirmed the November timetable from the rostrum of the UN General Assembly. The European Union, the Palestinian Authority's largest donor, publicly backed the vote to the very end. In the first ten days of October, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said the elections would provide a "long-overdue opportunity to renew the legitimacy of Palestinian institutions." A few days later, the promise made to Paris, Riyadh and Brussels turned into a piece of paper with a new date.
The Perfect Window: Hamas Collapsed, but Fatah Failed to Rise
At first glance, Abbas had chosen an almost ideal moment for elections. The war had gutted Hamas as a military machine and dealt a heavy blow to it as a political brand. A poll conducted on August 5–8, 2026, in Gaza and the West Bank by Ramallah's leading polling center recorded a collapse: support for Hamas fell to 24%, down from 35% ten months earlier. The share of those who believed Hamas had emerged victorious from the war dropped to 20% from 39% in October 2025. Support for armed struggle as the best path to Palestinian goals declined from 40% to 27%.
And here lies the trap that Fatah seems to have noticed too late. Abbas's party gained nothing from its rival's decline. Its support stayed flat at 24%. Among likely voters, Fatah drew 32% and Hamas 29%, a gap within the margin of error. Third forces polled 18%. The most dangerous figure for Ramallah: 44% of respondents believed that neither Hamas nor Fatah deserved to lead the Palestinians. Meanwhile, the strongest presidential candidate remained Marwan Barghouti, sentenced by an Israeli court in 2004 to five life terms.
Estimates for the West Bank diverge, and the divergence is telling. By one reading of the same data, support for Hamas there fell from 40% to 25%; by another, from 32% to 18%. The difference stems from the fact that the first measures willingness to vote for the movement, while the second measures party identification. I am inclined to trust the second figure as a more accurate indicator of the core base, but the trend is the same under either reading. The same pollster's fall survey, released after the postponement, showed Hamas at 19% and Fatah at 22%, with a third of Palestinians identifying with no faction at all. In the West Bank, that figure reached 48%.
These people did not leave Hamas for Abbas. They left for the void. One detail from the August poll explains why this void is no less dangerous for Fatah than for the Islamists: 72% of Palestinians opposed disarming Hamas before a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Disillusionment with Hamas did not mean agreement with Ramallah's course. A significant share of the departing voters, it seems, were punishing the Islamists for weakness, not for radicalism.
Fatah chalked up the municipal elections of April 25, 2026, as a win, declaring 2026 "the year of Palestinian democracy." The numbers look more modest than the rhetoric. Of 403 local bodies, voting took place in only 183; the remaining councils were formed by consensus, that is, without elections. The only locality in Gaza allowed to vote was Deir al-Balah, which had suffered less from the war than other areas. Turnout was 23% in Gaza and 56% in the West Bank. Of the 15 seats on the Deir al-Balah council, the Fatah-backed list won six and the list local residents associated with Hamas won two. The rest went to two independent lists.
Six seats out of fifteen is 40%, not a majority. And the victory was won on a field from which the opponent had been removed in advance. The election commission made eligibility conditional on accepting the program of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which includes a peaceful settlement and, in effect, recognition of Israel. Hamas and Islamic Jihad reject such commitments and formally boycotted the elections. The same filter applied to the parliamentary vote. In theory, Abbas could have held the November elections without Hamas altogether. In practice, no one would have let him: neither the street nor the donors demanding an inclusive process.
Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Man From Abu Dhabi
While Fatah celebrated its municipal victory, Hamas was looking for a way around the obstacle, and it found one in the most unexpected place. In August, the movement's new political bureau chief, Khalil al-Hayya, met in Cairo with Mohammed Dahlan. According to Hamas, the two sides discussed how to end the monopoly on national decision-making. Translated from political Arabic, the meaning is simple: how to bring Abbas down.
In late September, the alliance went public. Dimitri Diliani, a spokesman for Dahlan's Democratic Reform Current, declared that the Palestinian Authority had "failed Gaza and the Palestinian people everywhere" and confirmed that the factions were assembling a joint list that would bridge ideological differences. Mohammed al-Hindi, deputy secretary-general of Islamic Jihad, announced that his organization would not field candidates of its own but would support an agreed national list.
For Islamic Jihad, that statement amounts to a religious conversion. Founded in 1981 by Fathi Shaqaqi, the movement had never in forty-five years taken part in elections organized by the Palestinian Authority and regarded parliamentary politics as betrayal. The Gaza war destroyed most of its fighters, commanders and arsenals. The leadership faced a simple choice between loyalty to principle and physical survival. Judging by al-Hindi's position, they chose the latter, but in the most cautious form possible: backing the list without putting their own names on it.
The design of a "national list" made up of independents and technocrats was engineered with precision. It allows Hamas to enter the Palestinian political system without recognizing the agreements between the PLO and Israel and without handing its weapons over to Palestinian Authority control. The election commission's filter screens lists, not sponsors. Western sanctions lists screen organizations, not nonpartisan doctors and engineers.
The figure of Dahlan is what makes this design truly dangerous for Ramallah. Born in 1961 in the Khan Younis refugee camp, he headed the Preventive Security Service in Gaza in the 1990s and ran the Strip so single-handedly that Palestinians nicknamed his domain "Dahlanistan." In 2007, Hamas drove his people out of Gaza. Four years later, Abbas expelled him from Fatah, and in 2014 publicly hinted at Dahlan's involvement in the death of Yasser Arafat. The accusation remained purely political: the official Palestinian account of Arafat's death is different. Today Dahlan lives in the UAE, is regarded as an adviser to President Mohamed bin Zayed, holds a Serbian passport, and maintains ties in Cairo, Washington and Israel.
The man whose supporters Hamas threw from the roofs of Gaza high-rises in 2007 is now its principal ally. Of the entire prospective coalition, only Dahlan's movement does not appear on any list of terrorist organizations. Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine are all designated as such in both the United States and the European Union. Dahlan gives the Islamists what they lack: Abu Dhabi's money, Cairo's goodwill, and a face that Western capitals can talk to.
The Marxists Who Were First to Ask for a Pause
The Palestinian left is a story of its own. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was founded in December 1967 by George Habash, a Christian by birth and a Marxist by conviction. In 1969, Nayef Hawatmeh's Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine broke away from it. Both organizations belong to the PLO, and for decades both have been Fatah's main opponents within it. For them, the war with Israel was never a jihad: it was an episode in the struggle of oppressed nations against imperialism, in the spirit of Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong. They did not reject negotiations, but viewed them as an adjunct to armed struggle.
Logic pulled the left toward Hamas; instinct held it back from taking the leap. The Democratic Front tried to assemble a separate leftist list together with the Popular Front, keeping a broad list with the Islamists as a last resort. The Popular Front went further than anyone: it openly urged Fatah to postpone the elections and begin with a national conference, considering the moment unsuitable for any vote. Fatah said neither yes nor no, leaving the left in limbo right up until registration opened.
A meeting in Cairo on September 21 offered a vivid picture of the opposition camp's makeup. A Hamas delegation led by political bureau member Hussam Badran held talks with Islamic Jihad, Dahlan's current, the Popular and Democratic Fronts, the Popular Front–General Command, the Popular Resistance Committees and the Palestinian Freedom Movement. The Popular Resistance Committees, incidentally, were created in 2000 by former Fatah officials disillusioned with their own party's peaceableness. Half the people in that room had once come out of Arafat's movement.
What unites them is not a program. In a document dated May 1, 2017, Hamas agreed to treat the 1967 borders as a "formula of national consensus," yet it never recognized Israel. The Marxists cling to a secular state, the Islamists to one governed by Islamic law. Dahlan is bound by no ideology at all apart from his own return. They share a single common denominator: hatred of Fatah's monopoly and of the 90-year-old president who will not leave.
Who Really Hit the Brakes
The original version of events circulating in expert commentary is simple: Abbas took fright at a motley bloc of Islamists, Marxists and defectors and canceled the elections. The chronology tells a different story.
As early as September, Jibril Rajoub, secretary-general of Fatah's Central Committee, stated that the elections would not take place on schedule without a comprehensive national dialogue, and proposed holding the presidential vote first. On October 7 and 8, while the election commission was accepting lists, Rajoub and fellow Central Committee member Mohammad Shtayyeh held talks in Cairo with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front. On Thursday, October 8, two Palestinian officials told reporters that the parties had agreed on a postponement. At the same time, Rajoub froze the formation of the Palestinian National Council, tying it to the outcome of the dialogue. Al-Hindi publicly confirmed that the factions had reached an understanding on resuming national dialogue and delaying the elections. Hamas political bureau member Basem Naim called the original timetable premature.
On the morning of October 10, Hamas sources were still speaking of their categorical rejection of any delay without national consensus. By evening, it turned out, the consensus existed. The postponement was the product of Egyptian mediation and a quiet collusion between the two main rivals, not the whim of one old man.
Why does Hamas need a delay? There are two answers, and both carry weight.
The first concerns disarmament. On July 30, Donald Trump announced that the Board of Peace he had created had reached a "historic" agreement on the complete disarmament of Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza, mediated by Egypt, Qatar and Turkey. Under the Board's plan, a transitional administration would hold a monopoly on weapons in the Strip. Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan almost immediately stated that there had been no agreement to surrender all weapons. Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace's High Representative for Gaza and a former Bulgarian foreign minister, demanded at the UN Security Council on August 27 the full surrender of arms with no gray areas. November elections would have caught Hamas in the middle of this bargaining: weapons in hand and candidates on the ballot. That is precisely the combination that led the West to refuse to recognize the result in 2006. Back on May 13, Mladenov spelled out the key point: "We are not asking Hamas to disappear as a political movement." To take advantage of that opening, the Islamists must first go through disarmament, at least on paper. Ten extra months give them time to do so.
The second answer is the coalition itself. The alliance with Dahlan is only a few weeks old, the left has not made up its mind, and Islamic Jihad is only just getting used to the idea of a ballot box. The delay allows the bloc to be completed. More important, the anger over the derailed elections falls almost entirely on Fatah. The street sees Abbas's decree, not the Cairo protocols. Hamas gets to denounce the president for cowardice while reaping the benefits of that very cowardice.
Fatah's motives are more prosaic. Abbas turns 91 on November 15. In October 2025, he signed a constitutional declaration under which, in the event of a vacancy, presidential duties pass for up to 90 days to PLO Vice President Hussein al-Sheikh, the former head of the civil affairs authority responsible for coordination with Israel. Within those 90 days, a presidential election is supposed to be held. Palestinian opposition activists openly name al-Sheikh as the main driving force behind the current postponement. His logic is clear: a man whose legitimacy rests entirely on appointment rather than on a vote has the least interest in an election in which Barghouti remains the strongest candidate.
The postponement also has an intra-party dimension. In May, Fatah held its eighth congress and elected a new Central Committee, but the 2021 split has not gone away. November parliamentary elections without a presidential vote were turning into a dangerous dress rehearsal: any disgruntled official could defect to Dahlan's list or to a list of Barghouti supporters and test his popularity without risking everything. Combining the two votes on September 11, 2027, changes the stakes. One date, one big game, in which party discipline will find it easier to hold the waverers in line.
Israel Votes First
Six days after this article's publication, on October 27, Israel will hold elections to the Knesset. Parliament was dissolved on July 17, and for the first time since 1988, Israelis are going to the polls strictly on schedule. The Palestinian postponement became a convenient gift to the Israeli election campaign. On Friday, October 9, when rumors of a delay were already circulating in Ramallah, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar accused Abbas of "fooling the international community" by once again canceling promised elections.
Israel's position is internally contradictory, and Jerusalem understands this perfectly well. According to the Palestinian side, Israeli authorities barred election commission staff from East Jerusalem and Gaza. At the same time, Israeli diplomacy accuses Abbas of torpedoing the very vote for which it is not creating the conditions. The contradiction disappears once one admits the obvious: a weak Palestinian Authority without a mandate suits the Israeli government, while elections in which a Hamas-Dahlan list might win a majority would be its nightmare. Blaming Abbas, meanwhile, costs nothing.
Israeli strategists cannot help but remember the lesson of 2006. Back then, Israel and the West did everything they could to keep a parliament with an Islamist majority from functioning: they withheld tax transfers, arrested lawmakers, and boycotted Ismail Haniyeh's government. A year and a half later, Hamas abandoned parliamentary niceties and took Gaza by force. One can debate how much the boycott accelerated the takeover, but the link between rejecting an election result and automatic rifles in the streets of Gaza is obvious.
There is an older precedent as well. On December 26, 1991, Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front decisively won the first round of parliamentary elections, taking 188 seats. On January 11, 1992, the army forced President Chadli Bendjedid to resign, and the second round was canceled. The civil war that followed claimed, by various estimates, between 150,000 and 200,000 lives. The Algerian lesson and the Gaza lesson point in opposite directions. The first teaches that canceling elections won by Islamists breeds war. The second teaches that letting an armed party into power without disarmament breeds a coup. The Palestinian elites have found a third way: not holding elections at all.
Washington occupies a special place in this arrangement. Trump has added the Gaza war to the list of conflicts he personally ended, and the Board of Peace, which brought 40 states together for its inauguration in February, is an instrument for locking in that result. The American administration needs a functioning Palestinian partner, not elections for their own sake. As long as Hamas's disarmament stalls, and with more than 1,400 people killed since the October 2025 ceasefire according to Gaza's health ministry, a vote in Gaza looks to the White House more like a threat than a tool. The delay fits American logic no less neatly than Israeli logic.
The Price of Delay: Who Pays for the Silence
The Western reaction was tellingly tepid. Britain, France, Canada and Australia expressed deep regret. The European Union, which pours hundreds of millions of euros into the Palestinian Authority every year, limited itself to calls for a fair and inclusive process. No sanctions, no freezing of disbursements. Diliani of the Dahlan camp struck precisely at this point, holding the EU politically responsible for Abbas's autocratic rule. The accusation sounds cynical coming from a man tied to one of the most closed monarchies in the Gulf, but formally it is accurate: Europe has for years been paying for a system that refuses to hold elections, and it keeps paying.
Mustafa Barghouti, secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative, spoke of Palestinians' deep disappointment. Disappointment is a polite word. The generation that grew up after 2006 has received yet another confirmation that a voice in Palestinian politics is determined not by the ballot but by weapons, by money from Abu Dhabi or Doha, and by a pass through an Israeli checkpoint.
The winners are obvious too. Egypt has strengthened its monopoly on mediation: on October 14, delegations from eight factions, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Dahlan's current and the Popular Front, gathered in Cairo, and for the first time the question of bringing the Islamists into the PLO is seriously on the agenda. Through Dahlan, the UAE has gained its own entry point into Palestinian politics, bypassing Ramallah. Hamas has bought time. Abbas has won another year from biology.
Against this backdrop, there is only one loser, but a big one. The Palestinian Authority is definitively turning into a structure whose legitimacy rests on other people's guarantees: on Cairo, on Brussels, on the Board of Peace. Each new postponement lowers the value of its signature. Recognition of the Palestinian state by France, Britain and other Western countries in 2025 created a unique window for Ramallah. The postponement of the elections shows that the old leadership is not prepared to use it.
Three Scenarios Before September 11, 2027
The first scenario could be called the Cairo scenario. A national dialogue under Egyptian patronage produces a framework agreement: Hamas and Islamic Jihad join the PLO on compromise terms, and Rajoub's formula of "one authority, one law, one legitimate weapon" is accepted in words. Disarmament under the Board of Peace plan makes at least partial progress. A broad Dahlan-Hamas list runs in the elections, and Fatah presents a united front under threat of defeat. The result is a hung parliament without a stable majority and protracted coalition bargaining. For Palestinians, this would be the best of the realistic outcomes.
The second scenario is biological. Abbas departs before September 2027. The 2025 constitutional declaration hands power to al-Sheikh for 90 days, with an obligation to hold elections. Meeting that obligation within the allotted time amid the current divisions is practically impossible, while extending his powers without a mandate would trigger a crisis in which Barghouti from prison, Dahlan from Abu Dhabi and al-Hayya from Doha would all begin fighting for the inheritance at once.
The third scenario repeats 2021 and this fall. By the summer of 2027, a new pretext is found: Jerusalem, security in Gaza, an unfinished dialogue. The date is postponed again.
My forecast is unequivocal. There will be no single vote on September 11, 2027, across the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. By March 31, 2027, Hamas will not have handed its heavy weapons over to the mechanism created by the Board of Peace, and that fact will become the main argument for another postponement. If elections do take place, in Gaza they will follow the Deir al-Balah model: in one or two districts, with low turnout, under international supervision.
Where is a Palestinian politician capable of winning a fair election supposed to come from, when the strongest candidate sits in an Israeli prison and the most influential opposition figure lives two thousand kilometers from Gaza?
A Parliament Without a Building
I would sum up the main outcome of the October postponement this way. For twenty years, Fatah and Hamas could not agree on anything: not on borders, not on weapons, not on Gaza. In October 2026, they found a common interest for the first time: keeping voters from having their say while both are weak. For the Palestinian elites, democracy has ceased to be a procedure and become a weapon, drawn only when they are confident of the outcome. Right now no one is confident, so the weapon has stayed in its holster.
On November 13, 2023, Israeli soldiers of the Golani Brigade posed with a flag in the chamber of the Palestinian Legislative Council on Omar al-Mukhtar Street in Gaza. Within a few weeks, judging by satellite images, the building was gone. Today's politicians are arguing over the date of elections to a parliament that has no chamber, no lawmakers, and no voters under the age of thirty-eight who have ever cast a ballot. The postponement to September 11, 2027, changes nothing in this picture. It merely extends it for another eleven months.