Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have formed an electoral alliance with Mohammed Dahlan, the exiled former Fatah security chief and bitter rival of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, ahead of Palestinian parliamentary elections scheduled for November, the Associated Press reported Tuesday.
Islamic Jihad deputy secretary-general Mohammed al-Hindi confirmed the alliance in a rare interview with the AP in Istanbul on Monday. He said it was launched after efforts to bring all Palestinian factions together in a "dialogue for internal consensus on the overall Palestinian issue" failed.
Al-Hindi said Islamic Jihad, which has historically refused to take part in elections run by the Palestinian Authority, will not field candidates directly but will "support a national list that is agreed upon."
Dimitri Diliani, a spokesman for Dahlan's Reformist Democratic Faction, confirmed the alliance in a statement attacking Abbas's leadership, saying "the Palestinian Authority has failed Gaza and the Palestinian people everywhere."
The pact is a striking one. Dahlan, a former Fatah strongman in Gaza, was driven out of the Strip by Hamas when the terror group seized power in 2007, and was exiled from Fatah in 2010 after a bitter falling-out with Abbas. He has since been based in the United Arab Emirates, the driving force behind the 2020 Abraham Accords, and has extensive contacts in Washington. What unites the three, according to the AP, is shared frustration with Abbas.
Abbas, who reaffirmed at the UN General Assembly last week that elections would take place for the first time in 20 years, has said the parliamentary vote will be held on November 28 in Gaza and Judea and Samaria. He has repeatedly postponed elections in the past, most recently in 2021, when Fatah appeared headed for defeat.
The last Palestinian parliamentary elections, in 2006, ended in a Hamas victory. Israel and Western countries boycotted the Hamas-led government, and the following year Hamas violently seized control of Gaza, turning it into the base from which it later launched the October 7 massacre.
