President Mahmoud Abbas predicted the end of a five-year split between the two big Palestinian factions as his Fatah movement staged its first mass rally in Gaza with the blessing of Hamas Islamists who rule the enclave. “Soon we will regain our unity,” Abbas, whose authority has been limited to the Israeli-occupied West Bank since…
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians joined a rare rally staged by President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah group in Gaza on Friday, as tensions ease with rival Hamas Islamists ruling the enclave since 2007. A long hiatus in peace talks between Abbas’s administration and Israel has narrowed ideological differences between the two main Palestinian factions. Solidarity has…
Hours after Operation Pillar of Defense came to an end last month, here at the Forward we published an article suggesting that the campaign could boost Hamas. It was early days, but new polling seems to indicate that this scenario is panning out. The independent Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) has just…
The Islamist group Hamas said on Monday it was backing President Mahmoud Abbas’s attempt to win more clout for Palestinians at the United Nations, the latest sign of a rapprochement between the political rivals. The Palestinians are registered as an observer entity at the U.N. and Abbas wants to see them upgraded to a “non-member…
Late on the night of September 13, 1993 — the day the Oslo Accords were signed on the South Lawn at the White House — I was making my way to the door of a hotel suite where a dozen American Jews were talking with Yasser Arafat, when a young man in Arafat’s security entourage…
Palestinians voted in local elections in the Israel-occupied West Bank on Saturday, their first vote for six years and one with little choice, out of step with democratic revolutions elsewhere in the Arab world. The results were expected to largely reaffirm the Western-backed, mainly secular Fatah party, which runs a de facto government in the…
Palestinians in the West Bank go to the polls on Saturday in long-delayed municipal elections that have already highlighted deep divisions in the occupied territory and stoked complaints about a lack of leadership. The Oct. 20 ballot will hold up a cracked mirror to a political landscape clouded by financial crises, failure to reconcile the…
Imprisoned Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti, who last week called on Palestinians to commence a popular uprising against Israel, has been placed in solitary confinement in Hadarim prison, and denied his rights to see visitors. Barghouti, who also called on Palestinians to put an immediate stop to negotiations with Israel, made the remarks before Land Day…
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