Palestinians called to vote in municipal elections, first ballot since Gaza war

Palestinians in the West Bank and parts of Gaza began voting Saturday to choose mayors and municipal council members in the first elections since the start of the Gaza war, amid widespread disillusionment and limited choices.

Nearly 1.5 million people are registered on electoral rolls in the occupied West Bank, and 70,000 in the Deir al-Balah area of the central Gaza Strip, the two areas involved, according to the Central Elections Commission based in Ramallah.

When polls opened at 7 a.m., AFP footage from Al-Bireh in the West Bank and Deir al-Balah showed election officials at polling stations, while only a few Palestinians were turning out. Most electoral lists are aligned with Fatah, the secular nationalist party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, or are unaffiliated.

No list is claiming affiliation with Hamas, Fatah’s Islamist rival that controls the Gaza Strip and whose Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel triggered the war.

Mahmoud Bader, a businessman from Tulkarem in the northern West Bank, said he would vote without illusions. “Whether they are independents or from a party, the candidates won’t change anything in the city,” he told AFP, noting that Israel has controlled two nearby refugee camps for more than a year. “It’s the [Israeli] occupation that runs Tulkarem,” he added.

In other major cities, including Nablus and Ramallah, only one list is running.

Polling stations will remain open until 7 p.m. in the West Bank, while in Deir al-Balah they will close at 5 p.m. local time to allow counting in daylight due to electricity shortages.

‘Important opportunity’

The U.N. deputy special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, Ramiz Alakbarov, welcomed the elections, saying they “represent an important opportunity for Palestinians to exercise their democratic rights at a particularly difficult time.”

In Gaza, controlled by Hamas since 2007, these are the first elections since the 2006 legislative polls, which the movement won.

According to political science expert Jamal al-Fadi of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the Palestinian Authority is holding the vote only in Deir al-Balah “as an experiment (to gauge) its success or failure, since there have been no polls” since the ceasefire in October 2025. It is also one of the few areas in the territory, devastated by two years of Israeli airstrikes, where the population has not been massively displaced.

Abbas, 90, has remained in power since his election in early 2005, and his promises to hold presidential and legislative elections have not materialized.

Farah Chaath, a resident of Deir al-Balah, said he was happy to vote for the first time at age 25, saying the election “is confirmation of our continued presence in the Gaza Strip despite everything.”

The election commission said it had “hired a private security company to secure polling stations” in Gaza, spokesman Farid Taamallah told AFP. But a commission source in Gaza, speaking anonymously, said “Hamas police insisted on ensuring the security of the electoral process in Deir al-Balah,” referring to the deployment of “unarmed undercover security personnel” around polling centers.