Abbas promises to hold presidential vote; no timeline given

Fatah gathers for first election in decade, as PA’s Abbas pledges to continue reforms

3-day confab climaxes with vote for 18-member committee expected to play key role in post-Abbas era; PA president pans Israeli withholding of Ramallah’s funds

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party on Thursday began a three-day conference to elect its highest leadership body for the first time in 10 years, as it faces existential challenges in the wake of the Gaza war.

In an address opening the conference in Ramallah, Abbas pledged to press ahead with reforms within the PA, saying he was prepared to hold long-delayed presidential and parliamentary elections.

“We renew our full commitment to continuing work on implementing all the reform measures we pledged… We are ready to hold presidential and legislative elections,” Abbas said in an address to the congress, though he did not provide a timeline for the vote.

“The Palestinian people are the only people in the world living under occupation. Holding our conference today on our homeland’s soil confirms our determination to continue on the democratic path and open the way for youth and women,” the 90-year-old veteran leader said.

Abbas and the Palestinian Authority are under mounting pressure from the United States, the European Union and Arab states to implement reforms and hold elections, amid widespread accusations of corruption, political stagnation, and the body’s declining legitimacy among Palestinians.

The international community also wants the PA to play a key role in eventually running the Gaza Strip again after it was devastated in the war sparked by the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of southern Israel. Israel, however, bitterly opposes the involvement of the PA.

The conference is being attended by approximately 2,580 Fatah members, the majority of them in Ramallah, though several hundred are also spread across Gaza, Cairo and Beirut.

They are expected to elect 18 representatives to the Fatah Central Committee and 80 to the party’s parliament, known as the Fatah Revolutionary Council.

The Fatah Central Committee is expected to play a key role in the post-Abbas era, with many observers wondering whether he might finally step down after more than two decades at the helm, despite the lack of a clear successor.

‘Serious challenges’

The conference comes as the Palestinian national movement faces some of its “most serious challenges in our struggle,” Jibril Rajoub, the current secretary general of the Fatah Central Committee, told AFP ahead of the congress.

He expressed hope that the conference, repeatedly delayed, would contribute to “ensuring and protecting the establishment of a Palestinian state on the world’s agenda and protecting the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.”

Abbas, in his opening remarks, criticized Israel’s continued withholding of Palestinian tax revenues that Jerusalem collects on the PA’s behalf. Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has refused to sign off on the monthly transfers for over a year, preventing the PA from paying tens of thousands of employees, bringing the West Bank economy to the brink of collapse.

The amount of withheld funds — which are supposed to make up the majority of the PA’s budget — has climbed to over $5 billion.

“The continued holding of Palestinian Authority funds by Israel is an unprecedented event that violates the agreements between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, as well as international law,” Abbas said in his Fatah conference address.

Abbas also criticized Israel over its actions in Gaza, saying: “What is happening in Gaza is an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.”

He also dismissed accusations of corruption against the Palestinian Authority, saying they were vague and unsubstantiated. “No one should just say ‘corruption’ and go to sleep. Give me the name of a specific person, and within five seconds, he will be under investigation,” Abbas said.

One of the reforms most demanded by the international community was of the PA’s welfare system, which included payments to the families of terrorists and slain attackers.

Last year, Abbas signed a decree ending the policy, strictly conditioning welfare payments on the financial situation of the applicant, rather than their time served in prison.

A US State Department report from last month determined that the reform isn’t being properly implemented, though, the PA has rejected the findings, which relied on Israel and NGOs highly critical of Ramallah.

Fatah has historically been the main component of the PLO, which includes most Palestinian factions but excludes terror groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad over their refusal to accept the group’s charter, which includes recognition of Israel and support for a two-state solution.

In recent decades, Fatah’s popularity and influence have dwindled amid internal divisions and growing public frustration over the stagnation of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

The sense of disappointment led to a surge in support for rival Hamas, which made huge political gains in the West Bank in 2006 elections that it won handily, before going on to expel Fatah from the Gaza Strip almost entirely after a bout of factional fighting.

Hani al-Masri, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy Research and Strategic Studies (Masarat), told AFP that Fatah now merely uses the PLO to provide itself with legitimacy, “a legitimacy that is eroding in the absence of a unified national project, elections and national consensus.”

Rajoub nonetheless declared that the conference was a first step towards “putting the Palestinian house in order, to build a partner for establishing a [Palestinian] state.”

Succession

Fatah is the main party within the PA, which much of the international community views as a natural partner in rebuilding and running the Gaza Strip after the devastating war sparked by Hamas’s October 7 attack.

But Fatah remains marginalized in the territory, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly vowed that it, the PA and Hamas will have no role in post-war governance.

Instead, a new government of Palestinian technocrats has been established to replace Hamas in Gaza, though the panel’s entry into the Strip has been stalled by the terror group’s refusal to give up its weapons.

Despite repeated declarations from Fatah that it is working as a “united front,” major figures are absent from Thursday’s conference, notably Nasser al-Kidwa, a key Palestinian leader who is boycotting the gathering.

“This conference is illegitimate, and this leadership that has usurped power is illegitimate, and its time is up,” said Kidwa, a nephew of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Key figures competing to replace Abbas include Rajoub and PA deputy Hussein al-Sheikh.

Meanwhile, the president’s eldest son, Yasser Abbas, is on the ballot to join the central committee, having risen in prominence over recent years after he was named the president’s special representative despite often residing outside of the West Bank.

Among others present on Thursday were Zakaria Zubeidi — the former head of Fatah’s military wing in Jenin who had been serving a life sentence in Israel for involvement in attacks in which Israelis were killed and was released in the October 2025 hostage deal — as well as Arab Israeli MK Ahmad Tibi.