Mahmoud Barakat
26 December 2018•Update: 27 December 2018
By Mahmoud Haboush
GAZA CITY, Palestine
Hamas on Wednesday rejected a Constitutional Court ruling dissolving the Palestinian Legislative Council (Palestine’s parliament), insisting that the assembly would “remain intact until a new one is elected”.
The 132-member PLC largely ceased to function following a 2007 split between Hamas and Fatah (Palestine’s two leading political factions) after the former swept legislative elections one year earlier.
At a meeting held at the PLC’s Gaza City headquarters, leading Hamas member Ahmed Bahr described the court ruling to dissolve the council as “an attempt to delegitimize the majority [i.e., Hamas] and hijack Palestinian decision-making”.
"The Constitutional Court has no legitimacy," Bahr asserted, going on to call for presidential and legislative elections, along with polls for the Palestinian National Council (a PLO-affiliated legislative body responsible for formulating PLO policy).
He also accused Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of seeking to “maintain control over all institutions”.
“He doesn’t want anyone to challenge what he does,” Bahr said of Abbas.
On Saturday, Abbas pledged to implement the court decision dissolving the legislative council and called for fresh parliamentary polls within six months.
In a statement released the following day, Hamas accused Abbas of “trying to advance his agenda by wrecking the Palestinian political system, ending political pluralism, and destroying legitimate state institutions”.
The group went on to urge all Palestinian political forces -- and Egypt -- to oppose what it described as attempts by Abbas “to undermine all efforts aimed at achieving inter-Palestinian unity”.
Hamas and Fatah (of which Abbas has long served as chairman) have remained bitter rivals since when the former wrested the Gaza Strip from the latter after days of street fighting.
