AL-QUDS (Dispatches) – A new poll has found that nearly 80% of Palestinians want President Mahmoud Abbas to resign, reflecting widespread anger over the death of an activist in security forces’ custody and a crackdown on protests over the summer.
The survey released Tuesday found support for Abbas’ Hamas rivals remained high months after the 11-day Gaza war in May, when the resistance movement group was widely seen by Palestinians as having scored a victory against an allegedly “far more powerful” Zionist regime while the Western-backed Abbas was sidelined.
The latest poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 45% of Palestinians believe Hamas should lead and represent them, while only 19% said Abbas’ secular Fatah deserved that role, showing only a slight shift in favor of Fatah over the last three months.
“This is the worst polling we’ve ever seen for the president,” said Khalil Shikaki, the head of the center, who has been surveying Palestinian public opinion for more than two decades. “He has never been in as bad a position as today.”
Despite his plummeting popularity and refusal to hold elections, the international community still want to pass the 85-year-old Abbas off as the ‘leader of the Palestinian cause’ and a crucial partner in the talks with the Zionist regime, which ground to a halt more than a decade ago.
His Palestinian Authority administers parts of the occupied West Bank under interim agreements signed with the Zionist regime at the height of the talks in the 1990s. Hamas drove Abbas’ forces out of Gaza when it seized power there in 2007, a year after winning parliamentary elections.
Abbas’ latest woes began in April, when he called off the first Palestinian elections in 15 years as Fatah appeared to be headed for another embarrassing loss. Hamas’ popularity soared the following month amid protests in Al-Quds and the Gaza war, as many Palestinians accused the PA of doing nothing to aid their struggle against the Zionist regime’s occupation.