Entire PA government resigns
International efforts have intensified to stop the fighting in Gaza and begin work on a political structure to govern the enclave after the war.
(THE TIMES OF ISRAEL) Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said on Monday he was resigning to allow for the formation of a broad consensus among Palestinians about political arrangements after the conclusion of Israel’s war against terror group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The move comes amid growing US pressure on PA President Mahmoud Abbas to shake up the Authority, which would allow it to take a greater role in ruling postwar Gaza.
International efforts have intensified to stop the fighting in Gaza and begin work on a political structure to govern the enclave after the war.
Abbas is expected to choose Mohammad Mustafa, chairman of the Palestine Investment Fund, as the next prime minister.
The move signals a willingness by the Western-backed Palestinian leadership to accept changes that might usher in reforms seen as necessary to revitalise the PA, with the Biden administration hailing it as a “positive and important step toward achieving a reunited Gaza and West Bank under the Palestinian Authority”.
In a statement to the cabinet, Shtayyeh, an academic economist who took office in 2019, said the next stage would need to take account of the emerging reality in Gaza, which has been laid waste by nearly five months of heavy fighting sparked by Hamas’s October 7 onslaught.
The Palestinian Authority exercises limited governance over parts of the West Bank but lost power in Gaza following a bloody coup by Hamas in 2007.
Fatah, the faction that controls the West Bank-based PA, and Hamas have made repeated unsuccessful efforts to reach an agreement over a unity government and were due to meet in Moscow on Wednesday.
Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas and says that for security reasons, it will not accept Palestinian Authority rule over Gaza after the war.
Last week Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented the security cabinet with a document of principles regarding the management of Gaza after the war aiming to install “local officials” unaffiliated with terrorism to administer services in the Strip instead of Hamas.
For over four months, Netanyahu held off holding security cabinet discussions regarding the so-called “day after” the war, fearing this could lead to fractures in his mainly right-wing coalition.
Netanyahu has said he will not allow the PA to return to govern Gaza. He has sometimes qualified this by saying Israel won’t allow the PA in its current form to return to the enclave, indicating that Israel could live with a reformed PA of the kind the Biden administration has been pushing.
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