PA Calls for Elections; Chief Negotiator Erekat Resigns
The Palestinian Authority said it will hold elections by September in what is being seen as a response to the political upheaval in Egypt.
The decision to have parliamentary and presidential elections was announced Saturday in the West Bank city of Ramallah. It followed a meeting of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which is led by PA President Mahmoud Abbas and oversees the Palestinian Authority.
Hamas rejected the announcement and said it would not participate in the elections.
“Hamas will not take part in this election,” Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said. “We will not give it legitimacy. And we will not recognize the results.”
Taysir Khaled, a member of the PLO’s executive committee in Ramallah, told The Washington Post that the decision to hold elections “is not connected in a direct way to what happened in Egypt.”
“But,” he added, “you have to understand we are affected by how things are around us. We do respect the wishes and the demands of the Egyptian people.”
Also Saturday during the PLO meeting, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat resigned his position. Abbas accepted the resignation, according to The New York Times. Erekat has been part of the negotiating team for nearly 20 years.
He reportedly resigned due to the fallout over more than 1,600 leaked internal memos detailing negotiating sessions with Israel, which indicated that Palestinian peace negotiators were willing to turn over nearly all of the Jewish neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem and accept a shared authority of the Temple Mount. In one document, Erekat told U.S. officials that the Palestinians were giving Israel “the biggest Yerushalayim in history.”
The documents reportedly were stolen from Erekat’s office. Erekat told Israel’s Army Radio that he is stepping down to take responsibility for the leak of the documents.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
