Palestinians

JERUSALEM — Nickolay Mladenov, the top diplomat overseeing the U.S.-brokered ceasefire in Gaza, said Wednesday the truce hinged on Hamas’ disarmament, a sticking point that has stalled progress on other fronts, including rebuilding the mostly destroyed enclave.

The high representative for President Trump’s International Board of Peace in Gaza, Mladenov, said months without progress implementing the deal benefited neither Israel nor Palestinians. He said the phased deal was paralyzed over Hamas not yet disarming, calling it “not negotiable.”

International mediators have long said disarmament is core to the ceasefire, to which Hamas has agreed, but no significant progress has been made toward it. The Palestinian militant group has sought to link any demilitarization to Israeli troop pullbacks. Israel’s military remains in control of more than half of Gaza.

“The only way that we believe that we can ensure that Israeli withdrawal takes place to the perimeter is if we have the full element of the plan unfolding in Gaza,” Mladenov said at a rare press conference in Jerusalem.

Mladenov stated plainly that the plan envisioned in the ceasefire was off to a rocky start. He also said conditions remain dire and miserable for the more than 2 million people in Gaza. He accused both sides of violating the ceasefire but said it had mostly held and staved off the return of full-scale war.

Disarmament is among the most challenging elements of the ceasefire. Hamas, whose founding charter calls for armed resistance against Israel, has been reluctant to give up its arsenal, including rockets, anti-tank missiles, and explosives.

Mladenov did not answer questions about what could lie ahead for Gaza in the absence of disarmament. He criticized Hamas for consolidating power in parts of Gaza under its control, saying it hoped “to squeeze better terms of a negotiation.”

He also said that he could envision a role for Hamas in postwar Gaza if it disarms.

“We are not asking Hamas to disappear as a political movement,” Mladenov told reporters.

Israeli leaders have said they want to destroy the militant group that has governed Gaza for two decades and orchestrated the attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 as hostages.

Israel’s ensuing offensive has killed over 72,724 Palestinians, including at least 846 since a ceasefire took hold last October.

Mladenov’s remarks came as the Board of Peace faces scrutiny, with efforts to advance the phased ceasefire stalled.

The truce envisioned Hamas handing over its weapons, Israeli forces withdrawing and rebuilding destroyed swaths of the coastal enclave after more than two years of war.

Instead, the seven months since the ceasefire have seen Israel and Hamas trade accusations of violations. Aid groups say Israel has not allowed the promised amount of aid in. Hamas has not disarmed and remains in control of roughly half the strip.

Trump’s 20-point plan says that all of Hamas’ “military, terror and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon production facilities” in Gaza must be destroyed. It also says that weapons must be placed “permanently beyond use.”

Israel and the U.S. say this language is clear and that Hamas must surrender all of its weapons.

Hamas has sought to differentiate between “heavy” weapons, such as rockets, and “light” weapons like rifles and pistols, Hamas officials and mediators say, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations.

Israel has stepped up its attacks in Gaza in recent days, since the U.S.-Iran ceasefire, and many Palestinians fear a return of more airstrikes and full-scale war may be imminent.

Frankel and Metz write for the Associated Press.

In the occupied West Bank, a marathon is a political statement. Palestinians ran alongside the separation wall today, a structure that cuts them off from their land, their families, and even the sea. Al Jazeera’s @leila.shw reports from Bethlehem.

April 25 (UPI) — Palestinians in Gaza held an election for the first time in 20 years as municipal elections were held there and in the West Bank on Saturday.

People in Deir al-Balah, a city in central Gaza, voted for the first time since 2006 because it was the least destroyed area after two years of airstrikes by Israel after the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, CNN reported.

The elections, which also were held in many parts of the West Bank, were run by the Palestinian Authority and required candidates to agree with Palestinian Liberation Organization to recognize the state of Israel and support a two-state solution.

Elections were last held in the West Bank in 2022, The BBC reported, and had not been held in Gaza since Hamas took the enclave over two decades ago. Hamas was not permitted to participate in the elections.

Election results will be reported either late Saturday or on Sunday.

Salama Badwan, who voted with his wife and daughter, told Al Jazeera that the first election “is a truly Palestinian democratic celebration.”

“We must change everything through the ballot box,” Badwan said. “Whoever wins, it is their right, but not through inheritance … change must be through the hands of the people.”

Roughly 70,000 Palestinians — or 5% of the entire Gazan population — in Deir al-Balah were eligible to vote because many of the places that would have been used for voting were destroyed, as were supplies like ballot boxes.

The Palestinian Authority’s Fatah party dominated ballots as votes were held for 90 municipal councils and 93 village councils — leaving 42 other municipal councils and 155 village councils to be decided without votes.

Hamas praised the vote in Gaza and expressed hope for the rest of the territory to also choose its own leaders, although after its election in 2006 it forced Fatah out of Gaza in often violent battles and had not held an election since.

Ramallah, occupied West Bank – Hani Odeh has spent four and a half difficult years as mayor of Qusra, southeast of Nablus.

Surrounded by illegal Israeli settlements and outposts, the small Palestinian town of approximately 6,000 in the northern West Bank faces relentless settler attacks that left two residents killed last month.

Many are unable to access their agricultural fields as settlers repeatedly damage the village’s water pipes. But when his Palestinian neighbours go to the polls for municipal elections on Saturday, he will not be on the ballot.

“The resources are limited, the demands are many, there’s the settlers, the army – the problems don’t stop,” he says. “You can’t do anything for them. I’m exhausted. I just want to rest, honestly.”

Only three months ago, the Palestinian Authority (PA) announced that there would be local elections on April 25 for municipalities and village councils, the first such elections in nearly five years. There have been no national elections since 2006, keeping the Fatah-ruled PA in power in the West Bank more than 17 years after its initial mandate expired.

Odeh, who will be stepping down, doesn’t believe there is much point to the vote. “It won’t change the reality,” he says, pointing out that the gate to enter Qusra has been shut by the Israeli military for two years.

Meanwhile, the PA civil servants that Odeh relies on to run Qusra receive salaries of just 2,000 shekels ($670), a fraction of what they are owed, as Israel continues to withhold tax revenues earmarked for the Palestinians.

According to the Palestine Elections Commission, 5,131 candidates are competing across 90 municipal councils and 93 village councils on April 25, with nearly a third of the electorate between the ages of 18 and 30.

Across the West Bank, many agree with Odeh, and express doubts that these elections can move the needle on anything that actually matters.

‘Sense of futility’

In the days leading up to the vote in Ramallah, there have been no campaign posters hanging along the streets. That is because Ramallah – the city where the PA is headquartered – is not holding competitive elections this Saturday. Neither is Nablus, another major city in the West Bank.

Instead, both cities are being decided through a process known as acclamation, in which a single list of candidates is elected without a formal vote. Across the West Bank, 42 municipal councils and 155 village councils will be filled this way – a majority of local administrative authorities.

Historically used in small villages where extended families agreed on candidates, the process is now being applied in major cities that are PA strongholds – such as Ramallah and Nablus – where Fatah mobilisation has discouraged challengers.

“There is definitely a sense of futility in certain places,” says Zayne Abudaka, cofounder of the Institute for Social and Economic Progress (ISEP), which regularly surveys Palestinian sentiments and views, “and I think that makes it easier for places to just not have an election.”

Fatima*, a businesswoman who runs an education centre in el-Bireh, says she hasn’t voted in an election since the last Palestinian national election 20 years ago – and she doesn’t plan to this time, either. “They will choose a new group of decisionmakers, and I believe they will do the same according to the old decisionmakers,” says Fatima. “We don’t see any difference between them. It is not fair.”

Sara Nasser, 26, a pharmacist who commutes to Ramallah for work from the village of Deir Qaddis, west of the city, says she has simply grown accustomed to elections not happening and will not vote. “It’s been since before I was aware that there were significant elections,” she says. “We’ve always lived like this.”

Some hopeful, others less so

Not everyone is so pessimistic. Iyad Hani, 20, works at a children’s store and is enthusiastic to vote for the first time in his life in el-Bireh. “Hopefully, the one coming is better than the one who left,” he says. “There should be construction in the town and fixing the streets – that’s the most important thing.”

Muhammad Bassem, who is a restaurant manager in Ramallah, is also showing up to the polls, optimistic for what change may bring. “It is the new faces that bring about change for the better – always for the better,” he says. “We want our country to be beautiful, clean and to offer plenty of comfortable employment opportunities, tourism and development.”

Others are not so sure. Amani, who is from Tulkarem but works in Ramallah as a receptionist, watches the campaigns play out on her phone, though she does not plan to vote. “Right now, they keep saying, ‘we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that,’” she says. “But I don’t know if any of it will actually yield results.”

The Tulkarem issues she is thinking of, such as inadequate waste management, no parks for children and roads in disrepair, fall squarely into the kinds of changes that local elections might have an impact on, she suggests. “I just hope that something genuinely new and positive comes out of this.”

‘There isn’t a credible setup’

Underlining the question of these specific elections is a broad disillusionment with the PA that colours nearly every conversation about Palestinian political life.

Fatima says she and her whole family are politically aligned with Fatah, the effective governing party of the PA. “We don’t hate Fatah,” she says. “We hate the decisions they are taking right now.” While she says her business has contracted 85 percent in recent years, the PA still charges her 16 percent VAT.

That same disillusionment extends even to the elections in small localities like Qusra, which Mayor Odeh calls “a family affair, not a political affair”.

“People have lost faith in the parties, lost faith in the [Palestinian] Authority, lost faith in the whole world,” he says, expecting low turnout on Saturday. While most candidates in Qusra are politically aligned with Fatah, Odeh says no candidates in Qusra’s election this Saturday are doing so officially. “If they run under political affiliations, no one will support them.”

According to the Palestine Elections Commission, 88 percent of those on the ballots this year are doing so as independent candidates.

While polling suggests roughly 70-80 percent of Palestinians distrust the PA as an institution, Obada Shtaya resists framing this simply as a PA problem, considering the PA’s hobbled finances and its shrinking autonomy in Areas A and B under Israeli occupation. Israel continues to expand settlements and military raids in the West Bank, and the PA has no power to respond, with the prospect of a Palestinian state increasingly distant.

“Pessimism, lack of hope, helplessness – it is beyond the classical distrust in the PA,” he says. “It is looking at the PA and potentially understanding that these people also don’t have much that they can do to help themselves.”

A new amendment to the local elections law, requiring all candidates to affirm their commitment to agreements signed by the PLO – widely understood as a measure to exclude Hamas and other opposition factions – now threatens to taint how people perceive these elections. “If you want to run, you need to pre-agree to things at the national level,” says Shtaya. “But this is about local service delivery. Why am I having to sign things that deal with agreements between the PA and Israel?”

Despite the many naysayers in this election, “Palestinians are thirsty for democracy,” says the pollster, including those in Gaza. What is missing is not the will, he says, but the proper architecture for it: elections announced years in advance, a functioning legislature, and accountability that extends beyond voting day.

“There isn’t a credible setup that shows people their vote makes a difference,” says Shtaya. Without that, sporadic elections take place at what he calls the surface level: real enough that some people show up, but shallow enough that not much changes underneath.

Soon to be relieved of his mayoral duties, Hani Odeh plans to open a toy shop and set up a house for himself. “Let people breathe,” he says. “We’re here. We’re not going anywhere.”

Hamas says the Israeli escalation represents the failure of the international community to uphold the truce in Gaza.

Israeli forces have killed 12 Palestinians in attacks throughout Gaza, medical sources in the enclave tell Al Jazeera, as Israel continues its daily violations of the ceasefire struck last year.

An Israeli attack on a police vehicle on Friday killed at least eight people, including three civilian bystanders, in Khan Younis. A separate attack in Gaza City also killed two police officers.

Two other people were killed in the bombing of a house in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza.

Gaza’s Ministry of Interior called on the international community on Friday to intervene and end the Israeli targeting of local police forces working to restore security in civilian areas.

It said the attack in Khan Younis came after security forces intervened to break up a fight in the area.

“The continued silence of international organisations … regarding the targeting of civilian police officers constitutes complicity with the Israeli occupation, encouraging it to commit further crimes against a civilian institution protected under international law,” the ministry said.

“We emphasise that the police force provides services to citizens in the Gaza Strip across various aspects of daily life. There is absolutely no justification for targeting it or killing its personnel.”

Israel has been systemically killing police officers in Gaza, as it allies itself with criminal gangs in the occupied territory.

During its genocidal war on Gaza, which started in October 2023, the Israeli military regularly targeted officers securing aid convoys, which led to intensified looting. That, in turn, deepened the hunger crisis that Israel imposed on the territory.

A ceasefire, brokered by United States President Donald Trump, came into effect in October of last year. That decreased the intensity of the Israeli bombardment.

But Israel has nevertheless continued its attacks on the territory, killing at least 984 people and injuring 2,235 others since the truce was announced, according to health authorities.

Just this week, Israeli strikes killed five people, including three children, on Wednesday.

The overall death toll in the war has surpassed 72,500, with more than 172,000 others injured. Thousands of missing people are believed to be dead and buried under the destroyed buildings.

The number of confirmed casualties represents more than 7 percent of the enclave’s population of two million people. The Israeli assault also turned most of Gaza’s structures into piles of rubble.

Leading rights groups and United Nations investigators have concluded that the Israeli military campaign amounts to genocide: an effort to destroy the Palestinian people.

Under the far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has continued to bomb Gaza as it simultaneously attacks south Lebanon, in violation of a separate truce with Hezbollah.

Hamas on Friday called the deadly attacks in Gaza part of the Israeli government’s “unprecedented bloody, fascist approach”.

“This escalation … by the government of the war criminal Netanyahu represents a clear failure of the role of the mediators and guarantors [of the ceasefire] and the international community to quell the barbaric Zionist killing machine,” it said.

More than six months into the ceasefire, Trump has struggled to implement the 12-point plan on which the truce was based.

Israel continues to occupy most of Gaza. Reconstruction in the territory has not begun. An international security force envisioned by the agreement has not been formed.

In February, Trump convened his so-called Board of Peace that is supposed to govern Gaza through a council of Palestinian technocrats, but it is not clear when or how these forces will take over government agencies in the territory.