Palestinians in the Israel-occupied West Bank and a central area of besieged Gaza are heading to the polls for municipal elections in a first vote since Israel’s genocide in Gaza, marked by a narrow political field and widespread disillusionment.<\/p>\n
Nearly 1.5 million people are registered to vote in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, as well as 70,000 people in Gaza’s Deir el-Balah area on Saturday, according to the Ramallah-based Central Elections Commission.<\/p>\n
Most electoral lists are aligned with president Mahmud Abbas’s Fatah party or running as independents.<\/p>\n
There are no lists affiliated with Hamas. <\/p>\n
In most cities, Fatah-backed candidates will run against independent lists headed by candidates from factions such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.<\/p>\n
Mahmud Bader, a businessman from the northern occupied West Bank city of Tulkarem, where two adjacent refugee camps have been under Israeli military occupation for over a year, said he would vote despite having little hope for meaningful change.<\/p>\n
“The (Israeli) occupation is the one that rules Tulkarem. It would only be an image shown to the international media \u2014 as if we have elections, a state or independence” he told AFP news agency. <\/p>\n
Polling stations in the occupied West Bank will be open from 7:00 am (0400 GMT) to 7:00 pm, while in Deir al-Balah, polls will close at 5:00 pm to facilitate counting in daylight due to the lack of electricity in the war-devastated enclave, the elections commission told AFP.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Palestinians in the Israel-occupied West Bank and a central area of besieged Gaza are heading to the polls…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":409683,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-409682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=409682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409682\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/409683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}