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Palestinians show support for Hamas elections
Fatah's monopoly of power over the Palestinian Authority was decisively broken last night after two exit polls showed Hamas within five seats of overtaking it in parliamentary elections.
If accurate the polls mean that the militant Islamist faction Hamas will at the least have robbed Fatah of it of its overall majority and has left it dependent on other parties perhaps including Hamas itself if it is to form a government.
The Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki indicated that his exit poll finding of 53 Hamas seats to 58 Fatah could in theory even give Hamas the chance to form a government and that it had won the election in Gaza.
But the outcome could still afford Fatah, as still the biggest single party if the polls are matched by actual results today, to form a minority government in coalition with independent and leftists parties, leaving Hamas as a formidable opposition within the Palestinian Legislative Council.
The turning point in the history of the Palestinian authority came after a day notable for a largely orderly election in which more than 70 per cent of the 1.3 million registered voters turned out to vote in the West Bank and Gaza.
Mahdi Hassouna, a car mechanic, was delighted. "It's excellent," he said. "We expected there to be more problems, but it has all gone very smoothly." Night had already fallen when Mr Hassouna, 40, left work to thread his way through the noisy crowd of young men in their baseball caps holding aloft the green banners of Hamas and the yellow ones of Fatah to vote at the Karmel High School in central Gaza City.
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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article341041.ece
The Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki indicated that his exit poll finding of 53 Hamas seats to 58 Fatah could in theory even give Hamas the chance to form a government and that it had won the election in Gaza.
But the outcome could still afford Fatah, as still the biggest single party if the polls are matched by actual results today, to form a minority government in coalition with independent and leftists parties, leaving Hamas as a formidable opposition within the Palestinian Legislative Council.
The turning point in the history of the Palestinian authority came after a day notable for a largely orderly election in which more than 70 per cent of the 1.3 million registered voters turned out to vote in the West Bank and Gaza.
Mahdi Hassouna, a car mechanic, was delighted. "It's excellent," he said. "We expected there to be more problems, but it has all gone very smoothly." Night had already fallen when Mr Hassouna, 40, left work to thread his way through the noisy crowd of young men in their baseball caps holding aloft the green banners of Hamas and the yellow ones of Fatah to vote at the Karmel High School in central Gaza City.
More
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article341041.ece
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With voters still to be won over in the first Palestinian parliamentary election in a decade, attractive young women draped in green sashes lined up outside polling stations in Gaza to entice the undecided into supporting the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas. The teenagers smiled, sometimes demurely and sometimes broadly, and offered instruction on where to put your cross for Hamas.
It would not have drawn a second glance outside Gaza, but this was for a party whose women candidates are often so heavily draped in cloth they can only be identified in campaign posters by their eyes.
Hamas's main opponent, the once indomitable Fatah, could do no better than hire street urchins to wave banners and harass voters with flyers.
Last night exit polls put Hamas in second place with a victory of sorts in slaying Fatah's huge majority in parliament and forcing it to share power in a new government. The armed Islamic group's best hope for outright victory over Fatah is in the Gaza strip, which the Israelis are already calling "Hamasistan".
The smiling Hamas girls set the tone for a day at odds with Gaza's long suffering. The voting was orderly and transparent. The voters were enthusiastic at casting a ballot that might actually make a difference, even if only in finally being able to put one over on some particularly loathed politician.
"People are very excited," said Amal Kassanar, 20, who voted for Hamas. "You can't have just one party. We have to have several parties in parliament."
Ahlam al-Nwagha announced that she too voted for Hamas and, unprompted, that no one should think she was a prisoner of her veil.
"Nobody is forcing us to do anything. We change what we want to change," she said. "I want to change the government. Hamas must join because we must have different parties."
Among the more contentious candidates in Gaza was the Mother of Martyrs, who sent three of her sons to be suicide bombers. Mariam Farhat's campaign video includes footage of her helping her son, Mohammed, 17, to prepare his bomb belt and advising him on techniques that killed five Israelis. In the West Bank, a candidate appeared on the ballot as Hitler, a nickname he picked up because of his virulent hatred of Jews.
It may not be a surprise that Hamas will do well, but it is not what the Israelis hoped for. The new Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, said that the election was supposed to be a way of getting rid of Hamas. "The elections were meant to give power and strength to dismantle the terrorist organisations and not create a situation where those organisations sit in the parliament and then become part of the executive authority," she said.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,,1695148,00.html
We will need to wait and see.