The Palestinian Government resigns, hit by the war in Gaza and the lack of internal unity

The Government of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) announced this Monday its resignation before President Mahmud Abbas.

The decision to leave the cabinet has been taken in the midst of the crisis aggravated by the current war that has shaken the region since October and which has already reached close to 30,000 fatalities in Gaza.

It also coincides with a rise in the popularity of Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank to the detriment of the ANP following the attack that sparked the conflict.

The Palestinian Prime Minister, Mohamed Shtaye, in charge of communicating the resignation to the president, without directly referring to the militia that governs the Strip, has expressed that the authorities must seek a broad majority base on which to build a new government that is capable of to face the new challenges generated by the future that lies ahead for Gaza.

“This decision comes in light of the political, economic and security developments related to the aggression against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and the unprecedented escalation in the West Bank, including the city of Jerusalem,” said the Palestinian prime minister. .

Shtaye refers to the spiral of violence that not only affects the main theater of war, but also the rest of the Palestinian territories, such as the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

In his resignation statement, the Palestinian prime minister denounced “a ferocious and unprecedented attack [by Israel], genocide, attempts at forced displacement, famine in Gaza, the intensification of colonialism, the terrorism of the colonizers,” as well as the “unprecedented financial strangulation” suffered by the region, as reported by the official Palestinian agency Wafa.

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Latest news on the war between Israel and Hamas

Fatah, the Palestinian faction that controls the ANP, and Hamas have made no secret in recent months that they have to bring closer positions and close ranks in the face of the Israeli threat.

In the attempt to achieve a unity government, both parties plan to meet this Wednesday in Moscow.

“The resignation of the Shtaye government only makes sense if it is in the context of the national consensus,” Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas official, told Reuters.

The ANP is left without a Government at a time when the international community is working to achieve a new agreement for the ceasefire after the one reached in the last week of November, which allowed the release of more than a hundred hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

Contacts have been intense for weeks in Paris, Cairo and Doha between the main mediating countries (United States, Qatar and Egypt), as well as the parties in conflict, Israel and Hamas.

The role of the ANP

Since the beginning of the war, the participation or not of the ANP in the future of Gaza has been the subject of all kinds of conjecture.

After weeks in which Netanyahu refused to accept his intervention, he ended up admitting that it is impossible not to fill the power vacuum in the Strip, once Hamas is expelled, without them.

The resignation of the Executive is based on political, economic and security reasons related to "the aggression against the Palestinian people," the prime minister said this Monday.

Shtaye has also alluded to the campaign undertaken by Israel against the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), the denial of previously signed agreements or the increasing annexation of Palestinian lands.

All of these circumstances, under the current war situation, require a renewed authority that can face the new “challenges” that emerge from the current situation generated in Gaza, Shtaye understands.

The Palestinian prime minister calls for achieving “national unity,” as well as the “urgent need for a broad intra-Palestinian consensus,” that is, one that accommodates different positions, although he does not expressly cite the Islamists of Hamas.

The popularity of this group has grown in the Strip, which it has governed since its electoral victory in 2006 and has controlled alone since a year later, despite the enormous wave of destruction and the humanitarian disaster to which its inhabitants have been subjected by the offensive. Israeli.

In the West Bank, supporters of the Islamists have practically quadrupled with the war, as reflected in a December survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), carried out in collaboration with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

The conflict, which began on October 7 after Hamas murdered some 1,200 people in the worst attack against Israel in its 75-year history, thus claims its first political victims.

The war broke out at a delicate moment for both Abbas, 87, whose role was already in question.

The leader of Fatah, the majority formation of the ANP, is on his way to two decades without submitting to the scrutiny of the polls.

The race broke out when the leader of the Israeli government elected at the end of 2022, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was also under pressure.

What has happened in these almost five months has only eroded the role of both.

A prominent member of Fatah's central committee, Abbas Zaki, 81, already said during an interview with EL PAÍS last November that “the future lies in the unity of the different Palestinian forces.”

He acknowledged that Hamas's popularity "is greater now," although, in his opinion, that does not mean that the Islamists will be able to take over the reins of the Government in the West Bank.

The resignation of the cabinet this Monday opens the door for everyone to measure their strength.

The international community is suspicious of a possible greater role for Hamas in the Palestinian power apparatus, which would be a burden on the end of the war and the subsequent pacification and reconstruction of the Strip.

Prime Minister Shtaye affirms that it was on Tuesday of last week when he presented his resignation to the president and that he finally did so in writing this Monday during the weekly cabinet meeting.

Since then, some rumors about the resignation of the Executive had hit the press.

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