Palestinian Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh speaks during a press conference after several major donor countries halted their funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), in the West Bank city of Ramallah on January 28, 2024, amid continuing battles between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement in Gaza.
Zain Jaafar | AFP | Getty Images
Palestinian Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh said on Monday that he had submitted his resignation to allow the formation of a broad consensus among the Palestinians regarding political arrangements after the war launched by Israel against the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in Gaza.
This step comes amid increasing American pressure on President Mahmoud Abbas to make changes in the Palestinian Authority, with intensified international efforts to stop the fighting in Gaza and begin work on a political structure to govern the Strip after the war.
Abbas has yet to accept his resignation, and may be asked to remain as caretaker prime minister until a permanent replacement is appointed.
Shtayyeh, an academic economist who took office in 2019, said in a Cabinet statement that the next phase will need to take into account the emerging reality in Gaza, which has been devastated by intense fighting for nearly five months.
He said that the next stage “will require new governmental and political arrangements that take into account the new reality in the Gaza Strip, the national unity talks, and the urgent need for Palestinian consensus.”
In addition, it requires “the extension of the Authority’s authority over the entire land of Palestine.”
The Palestinian Authority, which was formed 30 years ago under the interim Oslo peace accords, exercises limited rule over parts of the occupied West Bank but lost power in Gaza after a conflict with Hamas in 2007.
Fatah, the faction that controls the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas have made efforts to reach an agreement on a national unity government and are scheduled to meet in Moscow on Wednesday. A senior Hamas official said the move should be followed by a broader agreement on governance for the Palestinians.
Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas official, told Reuters that the resignation of the Shtayyeh government would not make sense unless it came in the context of the national consensus on the arrangements for the next stage.
Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas and says it will not, for security reasons, accept Palestinian Authority rule over Gaza after the war, which broke out following a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, which killed about 1,200 Israelis and foreigners. According to Israeli statistics.
So far, nearly 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in fighting in Gaza, according to Palestinian health authorities, and almost the entire population has been displaced from their homes.
