Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank voted Saturday in municipal polls boycotted by the main opposition Hamas, the Islamist rulers of Gaza, in protest at the indefinite postponement of a general election.
No legislative or presidential election has been held in the Palestinian territories for 15 years, while the last municipal vote — also boycotted by Hamas — took place in 2017.
Of the 376 villages in the West Bank, 60 had no candidates standing and another 162 had a single list, leaving only 154 villages actually voting on Saturday.
The spokesman for the Palestinian Central Elections Commission, Fareed Taam Allah, told AFP that polling stations had opened in all villages scheduled to vote on Saturday.
Maslama Srour, a 26-year-old voter in Nilin, a village near Ramallah, expressed hope “that elections will lead up to a presidential election so that we can choose a president who represents us and a new government.”
Srour told AFP: “We don’t want the same government, we want to see something new, we hope to see change, new people, especially young people.”
Polling stations closed at 7:00 pm (1700 GMT), with nearly 65 percent of the 405,000 eligible voters casting ballots, according to the elections committee.
Results will be announced Sunday afternoon, it said.
This was the first of a two-stage process, with cities and towns due to vote in March 2022.
The municipal vote is widely considered inconsequential, as most candidates are running as independents and Hamas is not taking part.
They are “politically unimportant because they are taking place in villages and not the big cities”, and are “futile” in the absence of Hamas, political analyst Jihad Harb said.
The militant group, which has ruled Gaza since 2007, is boycotting the vote in protest at president Mahmud Abbas’s indefinite postponement of parliamentary and presidential elections that had been scheduled for earlier this year.
The Islamists had been poised to sweep the parliamentary election, which was widely seen as the real reason for Abbas’s 11th-hour delay in the poll. He cited Israel’s refusal to allow voting in annexed east Jerusalem.
Abbas’s presidential term was supposed to end in 2009.
Hamas and Fatah, the secular party led by 86-year-old Abbas, have been at loggerheads since 2007 when the Islamists seized Gaza after a week of deadly clashes.
