Palestinians will vote for a parliament this year, for the first time since 2006.
President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree on Thursday setting 28 November 2026 for elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council, the official WAFA news agency reported. The decree calls on Palestinians in Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to take part, and says a presidential election will follow in the first quarter of 2027.
The date carries 20 years of postponed history. The last legislative vote, in January 2006, was won by Hamas, and the split with Abbas's Fatah that followed left the territories with two rival governments, Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza, and no election since. Abbas, who took office in January 2005 for what was meant to be a four-year term, has held power for 21 years as vote after vote was called off.
The ground under this call has shifted. Hamas has just moved to hand over the running of Gaza to a transitional committee, dissolving the administration it had held for nearly two decades, part of the reordering of the Strip after Israel's war. A vote across Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza would be the first real test of whether Palestinians can be governed as one polity again.
The hurdles are old and unresolved. Past votes stumbled over whether Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem could cast ballots at all, a question Israel controls on the ground, and over whether Fatah and Hamas would accept a result that went against them. The decree sets a date. It does not, on its own, settle either.