The government of the Palestinian Authority, which governs and is based in the occupied West Bank, presented its resignation this Monday to President Mahmoud Abbas, according to Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh, a decision that he communicated to the president on February 20 but that he formally sent today. . The gesture could pave the way for a US-backed reform of the Palestinian Authority in order to move towards the creation of the two states.
Palestinians need “new political measures” and unified leadership due to the “new reality” imposed by the war in the Gaza Strip and the “escalation” of violence in the West Bank, Shtayyeh said. “The next step requires new governmental and political measures that take into account the new reality in the Gaza Strip (…) and the urgent need for an inter-Palestinian consensus,” he said in Ramallah. Furthermore, he added, it will require “the extension of the authority of the Authority to the entire territory of Palestine.”
His resignation must still be accepted by Abas, who may ask him to remain in charge until a permanent replacement is named.
Since the start of the war in Gaza on October 7 between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, many Palestinians have criticized the increasingly unpopular 88-year-old President Abbas for his “inaction” in the face of Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip and the increase in violence in the occupied West Bank.
Since the fratricidal clashes of June 2007, the Palestinian leadership is divided between Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, which was created 30 years ago under the Oslo Accords and exercises limited power in the West Bank, a territory occupied since 1967 by Israel; and Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip.
The resignation of Shtayyeh’s government comes as regional countries, Western countries and Abbas’s opponents advocate for a reformed Palestinian Authority that would ultimately be in charge of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, under the flag of an independent Palestinian State, once the war waged by Israel ends. But there are still many obstacles to making that vision a reality, starting with knowing whether this would be the will of the Palestinian people.
In an interview with Agence France Presse last week, opposition figure Nasser al-Kidwa, nephew of the late Yasser Arafat, called for an “amicable divorce” with Abbas and a new unity of the Palestinian political leadership, including some members of Hamas.
Fatah, the faction that controls the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas have made efforts to reach an agreement on a unity government and will meet in Moscow on Wednesday. A senior Hamas official said the resignation of the Palestinian executive had to be followed by a broader agreement on governance for the Palestinians. “The resignation of the Shtayyeh government only makes sense if it occurs in the context of a national consensus on agreements for the next phase,” a senior Hamas official, Sami Abu Zuhri, told Reuters.
