Abbas postpones Palestinian legislative elections to September 2027

November 2026 vote delayed and joint presidential and legislative elections set for next year, president says in decree.President Mahmoud Abbas has postponed what would have been the first Palestinian elections in nearly 20 years, issuing a decree to further delay voting for the Palestinian Legislative Council for almost another year.According to the decree, legislative elections planned for next month will be combined with a presidential vote and set for September 11, 2027, Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency, said on Saturday.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemslist 1 of 4Mahmoud Abbas: What will it take to ‘protect’ Palestine?list 2 of 4Gaza ceasefire ‘exists in name only’, more than 100 NGOs saylist 3 of 4A year after the ‘ceasefire’, Gaza’s healthcare is still collapsinglist 4 of 4What has Trump’s Board of Peace achieved in a year since Gaza ‘ceasefire’?end of listThe long-awaited parliamentary vote was originally set for November 28, with a presidential election expected in early 2027.The decree came after a committee of top Palestinian officials met on Saturday morning to discuss postponing the vote.The Palestine-liberation-organization" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="12457" data-entity-type="organization">Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) Executive Committee, which Abbas heads, said in a statement that conditions in occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were not conducive to holding elections, noting that Israel had not allowed election materials or international observers to enter Gaza.Israeli interference, including military raids, settlement expansion and settler violence in the occupied West Bank, has made a fair vote in November impossible, Wafa reported.The agency also cited Israel’s systemic withholding of Palestinian tax revenues and its restrictions on electoral candidates and international observers entering Gaza and occupied East Jerusalem, as reasons.As for Gaza, it said that the lack of progress on reconstruction and on deploying an international stabilisation force factored into the decision as well.The postponement leaves entrenched Palestinian leaders unchallenged and threatens to further erode the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) credibility among Palestinians and donor countries who fund it.