Politics & Diplomacy
Israeli think tank calls Hamas's exclusion from 2026 elections a defeat
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Hamas's absence from the Palestinian elections set for November amounts to a strategic political defeat, whatever consciousness of victory the movement claims from the war, a researcher at Israel's Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies argued in a paper published Thursday.
Col. (res.) Shaul Bartal, a former Israeli security officer in the West Bank writing for the Bar-Ilan University institute, framed the vote as a mechanism for rebuilding the Palestinian system's legitimacy on an institutional footing that deliberately excludes Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The timetable he cited: Palestinian National Council elections on 1 November, a Legislative Council expanded to 200 seats on 28 November — the first such vote since Hamas's 2006 victory — and a presidential election in early 2027, all under the reform program tied to the twenty-point plan and to international recognition of a Palestinian state.
Bartal wrote that President Mahmoud Abbas sees clearly what including Hamas would cost in donor pressure and Israeli-American countermeasures, while Hamas's own outlets attack the vote's legitimacy — one writer arguing that rejecting these elections defends democracy's true meaning.
The paper's conclusion carries an Israeli security establishment's stamp and its interests, and it concedes the movement still commands wide popular support. Its core claim stands as reported: a movement that won at the ballot box in 2006 now has no official channel to convert support into power beyond calling a boycott.
