Category: History & Politics
Key figures: Mahmoud Abbas (President of the Palestinian Authority), Ismail Haniyeh (Hamas, Prime Minister-designate), Khaled Mashal (head of the Hamas Political Bureau), Ahmed Qurei (outgoing Fatah Prime Minister), Jimmy Carter (international observer)
Summary
On January 25, 2006, the Islamist movement Hamas won a decisive majority in the second-ever election to the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), taking 74 of the body’s 132 seats against 45 for the long-dominant Fatah party of President Mahmoud Abbas. The result, certified by the Central Elections Commission on January 29, ended Fatah’s monopoly on Palestinian institutions and produced the first Hamas-led government. Because Hamas was designated a terrorist organisation by Israel, the United States, and the European Union, and refused to recognise Israel, renounce violence, or accept previously signed Israeli–Palestinian agreements, the victory triggered an international aid freeze and a financial siege of the Palestinian Authority. The ensuing power struggle between Hamas and Fatah culminated, in June 2007, in Hamas’s armed takeover of the Gaza Strip and the lasting territorial and political split between Hamas-governed Gaza and the Fatah-administered West Bank.
Background
The Palestinian Authority and the post-Arafat transition
The Palestinian Authority (PA) was created under the 1993–1995 Oslo Accords as an interim self-government body for the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Its only previous legislative election, held in January 1996, had been boycotted by Hamas and produced a Fatah-dominated council under Yasser Arafat. Arafat’s death in November 2004 opened a transition: Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) won the presidential election of January 2005 and pursued negotiations with Israel, while a fragile ceasefire (the tahdiya) held through 2005. Israel completed its unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip in September 2005, withdrawing settlers and soldiers—an outcome Hamas claimed as a vindication of armed resistance.
Hamas’s decision to contest the election
Founded in 1987 during the First Intifada, Hamas had historically rejected the Oslo framework and boycotted PA elections as a legitimisation of the accords. By 2005 the movement had built a substantial base through social-welfare networks and through public frustration with Fatah’s record of corruption, factionalism, and stalled negotiations. Hamas first tested electoral politics in the 2004–2005 municipal elections, winning control of several major towns. It entered the 2006 legislative contest under the banner “Change and Reform” (Arabic: al-Taghyir wa-l-Islah), campaigning primarily on anti-corruption and good-governance themes rather than its founding charter.
The Election
Electoral system and conduct
The 132 seats of the Palestinian Legislative Council were filled under a mixed system: 66 seats by closed-list proportional representation across a single national constituency, and 66 by plurality (“first-past-the-post”) voting in 16 multi-member districts. Voting took place across the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. Turnout was high—approximately 77% of roughly 1.3 million registered voters, with participation slightly higher in Gaza than in the West Bank.
A joint international observation mission organised by the Carter Center and the National Democratic Institute (NDI)—roughly 80 observers led by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter—monitored the vote alongside European Union observers. The missions assessed the election as orderly, competitive, and broadly consistent with international standards, with results reflecting the will of voters.
Results
| Party / list | Seats | Share of proportional vote |
|---|---|---|
| Change and Reform (Hamas) | 74 | ~44% |
| Fatah | 45 | ~41% |
| Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa (PFLP) | 3 | ~4% |
| The Alternative | 2 | ~3% |
| Independent Palestine | 2 | ~3% |
| Third Way | 2 | ~2% |
| Independents | 2 | — |
| Total | 132 | — |
Hamas’s seat majority was amplified by the plurality districts, where it ran a disciplined single slate while multiple Fatah-affiliated candidates frequently split the vote. Although Hamas and Fatah finished only a few percentage points apart in the national proportional ballot, Hamas swept a large share of the district seats, converting a narrow popular-vote lead into a commanding parliamentary majority.
Aftermath
Formation of the Haniyeh government
President Abbas, who retained his separately elected post, tasked Hamas with forming a government. Ismail Haniyeh was nominated prime minister and his cabinet was sworn in on March 29, 2006. Efforts to bring Fatah into a coalition failed, leaving a Hamas-only government coexisting uneasily with a Fatah presidency—a structural rivalry built into the PA’s institutions.
International isolation and the aid freeze
The Quartet on the Middle East—the United States, European Union, United Nations, and Russia—conditioned continued engagement and aid on three demands: that any Palestinian government recognise Israel, renounce violence, and accept previous Israeli–Palestinian agreements. Hamas rejected all three. Israel suspended the transfer of tax and customs revenues it collected on the PA’s behalf, and major Western donors curtailed direct funding to the Hamas-led government. The resulting fiscal crisis left tens of thousands of PA employees unpaid for extended periods; donors channelled limited humanitarian support through a “Temporary International Mechanism” that bypassed the government.
Factional conflict and the 2007 split
Tensions between Hamas and Fatah escalated into recurrent armed clashes, especially in the Gaza Strip, through 2006 and into 2007. A Saudi-brokered Mecca Agreement in February 2007 produced a short-lived national unity government, but it failed to lift the international boycott or end the fighting. In June 2007, Hamas forces routed Fatah-aligned security units and seized full control of the Gaza Strip. Abbas dismissed Haniyeh, declared a state of emergency, and appointed an emergency government under Salam Fayyad in the West Bank. From that point the Palestinian territories were governed by two rival authorities: Hamas in Gaza and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank—a division that persisted for years and repeated reconciliation attempts failed to heal.
Significance
The 2006 election was a watershed in Palestinian and Middle Eastern politics. It was a rare instance of a free and competitively contested Arab-world election producing a peaceful transfer of legislative power—yet its outcome exposed a central tension in Western democracy-promotion policy, which had encouraged Palestinian elections but was unprepared to deal with an Islamist victor it classified as a terrorist organisation. The aid freeze and diplomatic isolation that followed deepened Palestinian economic distress and hardened factional divisions.
Most consequentially, the election set in motion the Fatah–Hamas split that fractured Palestinian governance between the West Bank and Gaza. That division reshaped the trajectory of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, complicating every subsequent peace initiative and contributing to the blockade of Gaza and the cycle of Israel–Hamas wars that defined the following decades. The episode also became a frequently cited case study in debates over whether and how to incorporate Islamist movements into electoral politics.