TEL AVIV - Hamas will bar residents of the Gaza Strip from voting in elections that Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority president, has called for in January, officials said.
The order issued yesterday by the Hamas-run Interior Ministry in Gaza means that only West Bank Palestinians will be able to participate in both presidential and parliamentary elections Abbas scheduled for Jan. 24.
Hamas seized control of Gaza in June 2007 and purged leaders of Abbas’s Fatah Party in a wave of violence. Egyptian efforts to engineer a reconciliation between the two groups have failed so far, and both Hamas and Fatah, which rules the West Bank, consider the other illegitimate.
Hamas “rejects the holding of elections in the Gaza Strip because they were announced by someone who has no right to make such an announcement and because it came without national reconciliation,’’ the Interior Ministry said in the order.
Abbas was elected Jan. 9, 2005, to a four-year term as president of the authority. His term was extended last year with the aim that Hamas and Fatah would reach an agreement and hold joint elections in 2010.
Hamas won parliamentary elections in January 2006 for the Palestinian Legislative Council, which hasn’t been able to produce a quorum since the Gaza takeover.
A poll published Oct. 18 by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center suggested that 40 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza would vote for Fatah compared with 18.7 percent for Hamas. The survey of 1,200 voters has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
