Qassam Muaddi
Mondoweiss / April 25, 2026
Municipal elections were the last democratic outlet Palestinians had. This year, barely anyone is running, as two years of genocide and Israeli crackdown have hollowed out Palestinian political life.
Today, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were scheduled to vote for new mayors and municipal councils, but in many places, they didn’t.
This year, Palestinian local elections are being boycotted by several key political forces, leading to a complete absence of competing candidates in many cities and towns. Many see this as symptomatic of wider Palestinian society and politics after two years of genocide in Gaza and a brutal Israeli crackdown in the West Bank.
It wasn’t always this way. In previous years, Palestinian municipal elections have reflected the growing dynamism of Palestinian political life and a widespread thirst for democratic practice. It also always stood in contrast to the stagnation of the formal political system. Yet this year, the municipal elections show anything but dynamism, enthusiasm, or even significant public interest.
Over the past two and a half years, Palestinians have been living through the genocide in Gaza while simultaneously facing an intensifying wave of Israeli crackdowns, settler violence, and forced displacement across the West Bank. Together, these have left a deep imprint on Palestinian politics and social dynamics — upending priorities, sending shockwaves through Palestinian society, and forcing many Palestinians to reckon with the indefinite postponement of the only democratic exercise still available to them: local municipal elections.
Ever since the Palestinian legislative and presidential elections of 2006, which have never been repeated to date, local municipal elections served as one of the few spaces for free political expression in Palestine, along with union and university elections. The municipal elections of 2005, 2012, and 2017, held in major Gaza and West Bank cities, were widely regarded as a barometer of the prevailing political mood at the time. And from one election cycle to another, candidates and election lists only multiplied.
Little of that exists for today’s elections. During the 2017 elections, Nablus, Hebron, and Ramallah each had four electoral lists competing against one another for votes. In 2022, Nablus had six electoral lists, Hebron had six, and Ramallah had five.
This year, however, only two electoral lists are competing in Hebron. In Nablus and Ramallah, there won’t be any voting at all, since only one list registered for each city. The municipal councils of these cities, which have an outsized political importance in the West Bank, will be formed by agreements between candidates and other social and political local forces.
In the Gaza Strip, voting will take place only in the town of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, as it is one of the few towns in Gaza that still largely remains standing. Major cities such as Rafah and Khan Younis, in contrast, have been razed and forcibly depopulated, rendering any municipal governance impossible.
What are the changes that brought Palestinian political life to such a low point, and what does it say about the future of Palestinian society?
The elections law
This year’s municipal elections have shed the “thermometer” quality they once had, largely because most major political forces, apart from Fatah, are sitting them out. The four main leftist opposition parties — the PFLP, the DFLP, the Palestinian People’s Party, and the Palestinian National Initiative — announced in a joint statement that they were boycotting the vote. Hamas did the same in a separate statement. All cited the same reason: a new elections law amended by presidential decree last year.
The law changed key parts of the Palestinian electoral system. Most notably, it introduced an “open lists” model for municipal council elections. Previously, voters simply chose a list of candidates in the order presented. Under the new law, voters must also select five individual candidates from within their chosen list, or their ballot will be disqualified. This means the internal ranking of candidates can be reshuffled by voters, effectively stripping parties of their ability to choose the order of their own candidates.
But this is not the most problematic provision. The amended law also requires each list to have a “full formation,” meaning it must field enough candidates to fill an entire municipal council.
This amendment has a crucial implication: it excludes many local community activists who, in previous years, have used municipal elections to advance new proposals and participate in public debates as candidates. Many of these lists were nonpartisan, mostly composed of young candidates running together in various configurations. They gave local elections a diversity of voices that even the last legislative elections didn’t have two decades ago. The only forces capable of fielding full lists, therefore, are either family clans or established political parties.
Shutting down debate
The most controversial element of the new law — and the primary reason opposition parties refused to participate — is a requirement that all candidates endorse the political platform of the PLO and the PA, including signed agreements with Israel and relevant international resolutions.
This requirement shuts down political debate well beyond the narrow domain of municipal services — not merely because Palestinian political factions are divided over the Oslo Accords, subsequent agreements, and a long-dead negotiating process, but because those divisions bear directly on the daily lives of Palestinians and their communities, which in turn shape municipal politics.
One example is the Paris Protocol, one of the signed economic agreements with Israel that subordinates Palestinian economic development to the Israeli economy. This constrains what municipalities can do to develop their towns and villages — particularly now, as tens of thousands of Palestinian workers have had their Israeli work permits revoked.
Consider also that many Palestinian towns and villages lie in Areas B and C, where the Palestinian Authority is barred by signed agreements from maintaining any security presence. This year’s elections are taking place amid a wave of violent attacks by Israeli settler groups aimed at driving Palestinians off their land — attacks the PA is powerless to stop due to the signed agreements.
At another level, no candidate could theoretically run for local office under the banner of a party that officially opposes the PLO’s negotiating platform or criticizes the signed agreements. The new law, in other words, enforces political uniformity in any debate within the electoral arena.
Little opposition
Surprisingly, when the law was amended last year, it drew little more than critical statements. Even as elections approached, Palestinian civil society and legal groups mounted no real pressure campaign against it. The contrast with 2017 is striking: when the PA introduced a law on “electronic crimes” — allowing the general prosecutor to pursue individuals over social media posts — sustained protests forced the PA to freeze its application, open a dialogue with civil society, and eventually amend the law.
The following year, the Palestinian Constitutional Court officially dissolved the Palestinian Legislative Council, which had been inactive since 2007. That same year, the Palestinian government adopted a policy paper stipulating that new legislation should be discussed with civil society.
“If there had been any form of social dialogue, even in the absence of the Legislative Council, the elections law amendment would never have passed so easily,” said Ashraf Abul Hayeh, a Palestinian jurist and human rights lawyer who has represented Palestinian legal groups before the PA. “There is no will to open dialogue on the part of the PA, and little opposition from either of the political parties or civil society.”
Abul Hayeh attributes this to the weight of circumstances. With Gaza under genocidal assault and the West Bank in the grip of an escalating Israeli crackdown, he says, municipal elections have come to feel like a secondary concern, which is “somewhat irrelevant to many ordinary Palestinians and political actors alike.”
“The amendment of the law makes it difficult to show any competition, but no side is interested in showing such competition anyway,” said Abul Hayeh, noting that many candidates would face Israeli repression if they ran under their party labels. Abul Hayeh notes that “the abnormal conditions of the past two years have made social mobility over an elections law seem much less urgent.”
The broader context helps explain why. The PA has been explicit about its strategy of “taking pretexts away” from Israel — a bid to forestall major Israeli military action against itself and the Palestinian population of the West Bank. Under this logic, it is determined to project an image of political uniformity, keeping any discourse that departs from its official stance of non-confrontation out of public life.
Opposition parties, especially Hamas, are not willing to expose their candidates, while also seeking to make a point over the amendment of the law. As for civil society and legal groups, they have bigger fish to fry under the current conditions, with a humanitarian disaster stagnating in Gaza, and another increasing in the West Bank.
In many towns and villages, the formation of the new municipal council is being carried out by clans, with some participation from local associations. Yet in Gaza, hundreds of local communities don’t even exist anymore.
“This year’s elections show the degree to which political life — and even social debate — in Palestine have been affected by the post-October 7 situation and the occupation’s policies,” said Abul Hayeh. “It will take a long time for Palestinians to recover.”
Qassam Muaddi is the Palestine Staff Writer for Mondoweiss
