Summary
Municipal elections are being organized under rules that restrict participation to those aligned with a dominant political platform, effectively limiting pluralism. The approach aims to block militant groups but relies on vague commitments that are difficult to enforce and may be easily circumvented. Some organizations with violent histories would still be eligible under existing structures. These moves also clash with international reform frameworks and governance arrangements for Gaza.
Key Takeaways
- Electoral rules are being reshaped to require adherence to a single political framework, narrowing genuine political competition.
- The criteria used to exclude militant groups rely on ambiguous pledges that lack enforcement and may not effectively prevent participation by violent actors.
- The planned elections and related decisions conflict with international reform expectations and agreed governance conditions for Gaza.
Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is experimenting with the boundaries of democracy. While his experiment has several different goals and target audiences, the underlying principle remains the same: In the PA dominated by Abbas’s Fatah party, under the umbrella of the Fatah-dominated Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), democracy, as the Western world sees the term, is dead. In its place, Abbas is turning the PA into a Communist-Soviet style democracy in which everyone can vote, but only for one party.
PA Municipal Elections
On April 25, 2026, the PA is scheduled to hold municipal elections. In preparation for the event, Abbas has issued several “decrees,” the latest of which was issued on January 27, 2026.
The goal of the decree was to prevent the participation in the elections of the genocidal Hamas, which planned and executed the October 7, 2023, massacre.
While the goal of the decree was certainly worthy, the manner in which Abbas achieved the goal was despicable.
Instead of clearly and openly proclaiming that internationally-designated terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, all of whom participated in the October 7 massacre, cannot participate in the elections because they are genocidal terrorists, Abbas chose a different path.
In the decree, Abbas decided to limit participation in the elections to lists and candidates that “commit to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s program [platform], its international commitments and the decisions of international legitimacy.”
According to Abbas’s theory, since Hamas and PIJ do not accept the PLO’s hegemony and dominance, requiring them to swear allegiance to the PLO’s platform will exclude them from participating in the elections.
More Holes Than Cheese
Similar to Swiss cheese, Abbas’s decree has more holes than substance.
The foremost hole in Abbas’s plan is the baseless assumption that committing to the PLO’s program is a guarantee for rejecting terror. While the PLO did feign, as part of the Oslo Accords, rejecting violence and terror as a means to achieve the organization’s goals, the actions of the last three decades have proven that commitment to be entirely hollow.
Instead of striving to achieve peace, the PLO has used the PA as a vehicle to intensify the conflict. Some of these efforts include using the PA education system to brainwash and indoctrinate generations of Palestinians to hate Israel and Israelis and to seek the demise of the former and the death of the latter. The PA media mechanisms are used to incite violence, terror, and murder. Terrorist murderers and other terrorists are not only glorified but also rewarded with substantial cash payments as part of the PLO/PA’s infamous “Pay-for-Slay” policy.
This is not coincidental. Instead, it is simply the implementation of the PLO’s 1974 “Plan of Stages” to destroy Israel.1
Thus, when Abbas requires that only lists and candidates committed to the PLO’s program may participate in the elections, he is not placing substantive restrictions on the participation of the terrorists. Rather, by using ambiguous language, Abbas is actually winking to Hamas and the other terrorists, telling them that they can make the empty promise without giving up on their genocidal goals too.
Moreover, to circumvent Abbas’s plan, both Hamas and PIJ could simply play along and make the necessary commitment fully acknowledging that there is no mechanism to enforce its actual fulfillment.
No less worrying, while Hamas and PIJ would potentially have to feign the acceptance of PLO dominance, the PFLP, itself a murderous terrorist organization that has always rejected the Oslo Accords and openly rejects Israel’s right to exist, remains to this day a member of the PLO and would be allowed to participate without any pretense.
Abbas’s Experimental Balloon to Hoodwink the World
The reason Abbas and the PA are making such a big deal about limiting participation in the PA municipal elections to acceptance of PLO dominance is opaquely clear. As part of his commitments to French President Macron, in return for French recognition of the non-existent “State of Palestine,” Abbas promised that the general PA elections he promised ”will be inclusive and open, based on new party legislation, solely to political forces and candidates that clearly accept the PLO political platform…”2
By implementing this commitment already in anticipation of the PA municipal elections, Abbas is trying to prove his intentions and demonstrate how his feeble restriction on electoral participation actually excludes Hamas.
Abbas is hoping that the entire international community will ignore the fact that, while Hamas did participate in the PA’s 2006 general elections, it has not participated in the PA’s municipal elections. In fact, not only did Hamas actively boycott the 2017 and 2021 PA municipal elections, but the terrorists also prevented those elections from taking place in the Gaza Strip.
Notwithstanding this reality, Abbas will no doubt point to the “success” of his new restriction in preventing Hamas participation, in the knowledge that the willfully blind, such as Macron and the other leaders who fell for his lies, will again fall prey to his deftly sleight of hand.
Abbas Directly Challenges the Authority of President Trump
President Trump’s 20-point “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict,” originally presented on September 29, 2025, was adopted by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on November 17, 2025.3
The plan noted that the Gaza Strip would be governed by the Board of Peace and its organs “until such time as the Palestinian Authority (PA) has satisfactorily completed its reform program, as outlined in various proposals, including President Trump’s peace plan in 2020 and the Saudi-French Proposal, and can securely and effectively take back control of Gaza.”4
While President Trump’s plan made crystal clear that the PA would not have any governance function in the Gaza Strip until it completed comprehensive reform, the PA decisions and documents5 organizing the elections, adopted on January 6, 2026, nonetheless indicated that the PA municipal elections would include elections in the “Northern Gaza District,” the “Gaza District,” the “Deir Al Balah District,” the “Khan Yunis District,” and the “Rafah District.”
Needless to say, these PA decisions stand, at the very least, in direct contradiction to Trump’s plan and should probably more accurately be understood as a direct challenge by Abbas, the PA Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa, and the PA Minister of Local Government, Dr. Eng. Sami Hijjawi, to President Trump’s authority.
Policy Recommendation
As part of the comprehensive reforms needed and to prevent the participation of terrorists in any PA elections, the PA must be forced to adopt legislation prohibiting the registration of any candidates or parties that “commit or advocate racism” or who “pursue the implementation of their aims by unlawful or nondemocratic means.”
These are the stipulations that the PLO already agreed to as part of the Oslo Accords,6 but never implemented. The task of ensuring that candidates or parties actually conform and comply with these requirements should not be given, at least initially, to the PA bodies, since it would be akin, literally, to letting the proverbial cat guard the cream or, more accurately, allowing a genocidal jihadist to decide what constitutes terror.
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Notes
