![\"ramallah\"](\"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/ramallah.jpg\")
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Ramallah – The Ramallah-based Palestinian High Court on Thursday suspended Palestinian municipal polls set for later this year that would have seen Palestine\u2019s two main political movements — Hamas and Fatah — directly compete against one another for the first time in a decade.<\/strong><\/p>\n The court ostensibly postponed the vote in order to look into complaints that the planned election would not cover Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem and allegations that courts in the Gaza Strip — governed by Hamas since 2007 — “lacked legitimacy”.<\/p>\n Court officials reportedly plan to reconvene on Dec. 21 after looking into the complaints and allegations.<\/p>\n Notably, the decision came shortly after a Gaza-based court ruled to annul five Fatah-linked electoral lists.<\/p>\n “This ruling [annulling the Fatah-linked lists] was issued by a Hamas-run court [in Gaza] with a view to derailing the upcoming polls,” Gaza-based Fatah spokesman Fayez Abu Eita said in a statement.<\/p>\n Jamil al-Khalidi, however, the Gaza-based regional director of the independent Central Election Commission, told Anadolu Agency that the Gaza court’s ruling was “in accordance with commission regulations”.<\/p>\n Last week, the election commission itself annulled four Fatah-linked electoral lists in the Gaza Strip.<\/p>\n The polls had been scheduled to take place in October in both the Gaza Strip and the Israel-occupied West Bank.<\/p>\n In the past, the Israeli authorities have consistently prevented Palestinian voting in municipal polls in occupied East Jerusalem, which the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority views as the Palestinian capital.<\/p>\n “Why does Jerusalem not have a [Palestinian] municipal council or General Secretariat to represent the masses?” prominent Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti wrote on The Palestine Chronicle news website last week.<\/p>\n Israel occupied East Jerusalem during the 1967 Middle East War. It later annexed the city in 1980, claiming it as the capital of the Jewish state in a move never recognized by the international community.<\/p>\n Hamas, meanwhile, voiced its rejection of Thursday\u2019s court ruling by the Ramallah-based high court, describing it as “a political — rather than legal — move”.<\/p>\n “The court issued this ruling in order to rescue Fatah after several of the latter\u2019s electoral lists were annulled,” Hamas said in a Thursday statement.<\/p>\n The last elections in the Palestinian territories — legislative polls held in 2006 — saw Hamas win 76 out of 132 seats on the Palestinian Legislative Council.\/AA\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ramallah – The Ramallah-based Palestinian High Court on Thursday suspended Palestinian municipal polls set for later this year that would have seen Palestine\u2019s two main political movements — Hamas and Fatah — directly compete against one another for the first time in a decade. The court ostensibly postponed the vote in order to look into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[151,232,553],"class_list":["post-3877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world","tag-elections","tag-palestine","tag-ramallah"],"views":594,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3877"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3879,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3877\/revisions\/3879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}