Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh announced his resignation yesterday, as the Palestinian Authority looks to build support for an expanded role following Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.
The move comes amid growing US pressure on President Mahmoud Abbas to shake up the authority as international efforts intensify to stop the fighting in Gaza and begin work on a political structure to govern the enclave after the war.
Abbas accepted Shtayyeh’s resignation and asked him to stay on as caretaker until a permanent replacement is appointed.
The Palestinian Authority, created about 30 years ago as part of the interim Oslo peace accords, has been badly undermined by accusations of ineffectiveness and corruption and the prime minister holds little effective power.
But Shtayyeh’s departure marks a symbolic shift that underlines Abbas’ determination to ensure the Authority maintains its claim to leadership as international pressure grows for a revival of efforts to create a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
In a statement to cabinet, Shtayyeh, an academic economist who took office in 2019, said the next administration would need to take account of the emerging reality in Gaza, which has been laid waste by nearly five months of heavy fighting.
He said the next stage would “require new governmental and political arrangements that take into account the emerging reality in the Gaza Strip, the national unity talks, and the urgent need for an inter-Palestinian consensus”.
In addition, it would require “the extension of the Authority’s authority over the entire land, Palestine”.
No successor has been appointed but Abbas is widely expected to name Mohammad Mustafa, a former World Bank official who is chairman of the Palestine Investment Fund (PIF) with experience of rebuilding Gaza after a previous war in 2014. There has been no word on elections, which have not been held since 2006.
Meanwhile, Israeli officials headed yesterday to Qatar, where the ruling emir separately met the chief of Hamas, as the enemies in the Gaza war closed in on a ceasefire-and-hostage deal that Washington says is now within reach.
The presence of both sides for so-called proximity talks – meeting mediators separately while in the same city – suggested negotiations were further along than at any time since a big push at the start of February, when Israel rejected a Hamas counter-offer for a four-and-a-half-month truce.
In public, both sides continued to take positions far apart on the ultimate aims of a truce, while blaming each other for holding up the talks.
Israel says it will agree only to a temporary pause in fighting to secure the release of hostages. Hamas says it will not free them without an agreement that leads to a permanent end to the war.
After meeting Qatar’s Amir Shaikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the reclusive head of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, said his group had embraced mediators’ efforts to find an end to the war, and accused Israel of stalling at while Gazans die under siege.
“We will not allow the enemy to use negotiations as a cover for this crime,” he said.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel was ready for a deal, and it was now up to Hamas to drop demands he described as “outlandish” and “from another planet”.
“Obviously, we want this deal if we can have it. It depends on Hamas. It’s really now their decision,” he told US network Fox News in an interview. “They have to come down to reality.”
The office of Qatar’s Amir said Shaikh Tamim and the Hamas chief had discussed Qatar’s efforts to broker an “immediate and permanent ceasefire agreement in the Gaza Strip”.
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