Israeli Press
Maariv says the Shin Bet warns Hamas is building election alliances
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Israel's internal security service has told closed discussions that Hamas is assembling a broad partnership with other Palestinian factions and currents in order to contest November's legislative election without running under its own name, the Israeli daily Maariv reported on Saturday.
The report, by the paper's correspondent Anna Barsky, describes an assessment presented inside Israel's security establishment rather than a public statement, and quotes no official by name. In it the Shin Bet calls Hamas the central threat in the occupied West Bank and says the movement is expanding infrastructure, recruiting and campaigning there.
One line from the discussions reads that this could take us in unwanted directions, with a call to begin building an Israeli strategy now.
The obstacle the assessment describes is written into Palestinian law. The 2025 amendment lowered the electoral threshold to one per cent, and at the same time required every candidate list to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and to accept the relevant international resolutions, in its published platform.
Maariv's reading is that the clause bars Hamas from standing as itself, and that a coalition list is the way around it.
What the Israeli assessment says about Ramallah#
The same account names the conditions it expects Hamas to grow in: economic hardship, weak Palestinian Authority institutions and public distrust of the leadership in Ramallah.
Palestinians go to the polls in late November for the first Legislative Council election since January 2006, when Hamas won a parliamentary majority and the result was answered with a boycott, an aid freeze and, in the end, the split between Gaza and the West Bank.
Israeli intelligence assessments are not neutral descriptions, and a Palestinian reader is entitled to read this one as an argument for a policy as much as a picture of the field. What the report does confirm is that the election is being studied closely in Tel Aviv, and that the question of who may lawfully appear on a Palestinian ballot is already being answered outside Palestinian hands.
