In the days after Yasser Arafat's death in November 2004, the Palestinian leadership scrambled to steady a fragile situation in the occupied Palestinian territories. Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei, who also chaired the National Security Council, publicly demanded an end to what he called “armed chaos,” insisting that armed demonstrations stop and that everyone respect the law. The disorder, he said, served no one but those who profited from it, and the dominant Fatah movement was weighing how to restore order.
The worry was concrete. Days earlier, gunmen had opened fire inside a mourning tent for Arafat, shortly after the arrival of Mahmoud Abbas, the newly installed chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Abbas had tried during an earlier term as prime minister to persuade armed factions to disarm; he won a short-lived agreement from groups including Hamas and Islamic Jihad to hold their fire, but it broke down after seven weeks. Qorei had hit the same wall since succeeding him in 2003, repeatedly rebuffed by Hamas.
The meetings Qorei held in Gaza with lawmakers and leftist groups, among them the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, were part of a wider push to hold the Palestinian Authority together before a presidential election set for 9 January 2005 to choose Arafat's successor. Abbas was widely expected to be Fatah's candidate. Qorei, whose standing with parliament had suffered after a wave of kidnappings in Gaza that summer, said a new government would be formed and submitted to the legislature once the vote was held.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this AFP wire report, first published in November 2004, in its own words.