Domestic affairs, the Gaza Strip, and relations with Hamas

Arafat remained president until his death in 2004; Abbas succeeded him as chairman of the PLO and was elected president of the PA in 2005. Elections for the PLC were held in 2006, and Hamas won a surprise victory over Fatah. Hamas and Fatah eventually formed a coalition government, with Hamas legislator Ismail Haniyeh as prime minister, but violence between their forces escalated in the Gaza Strip. After a week of fighting, Hamas forces defeated Fatah forces and took control of the Gaza Strip, which led Abbas to dismiss Haniyeh and the Hamas-led government and declare a state of emergency in June 2007. Fatah and Hamas made several attempts at reconciliation throughout Abbas’s presidency, but reintegration of Hamas into the PA was never fully implemented before rifts would reemerge.

Abbas appointed Finance Minister Salam Fayyad as prime minister of the emergency government. Fayyad pursued a neoliberal state-building agenda to develop government institutions and spur economic growth in preparation for a fully functioning independent state. Many Western governments and foreign observers hailed “Fayyadism” as constructive for a future Palestinian state and as nonconfrontational toward Israel. Fayyad had little support among Palestinians, however, who saw his endeavors as an ephemeral and wasted effort in the absence of real diplomatic progress that could guarantee these institutions stability and permanence. Indeed, his policies delivered a level of success, and in early 2011 the United Nations issued a report finding that the PA had developed institutions “sufficient for a functioning government of a state,” although it would still rely on Israel for matters such as energy and tax collection. But diplomatic tensions during that time caused Israel and others to withhold funds from the PA, leading to a financial crisis. Fayyad resigned in 2013 and foreign aid for the PA remained below pre-2013 levels in subsequent years.

Rami Hamdallah, then president of Al-Najah National University in Nablus, was appointed in Fayyad’s place as caretaker. The following year, upon agreement with Hamas, Hamdallah (who was not affiliated with either Fatah or Hamas) was reappointed prime minister, this time to head a unity government and implement a reconciliation process with Hamas. The PA began taking over some government functions in the Gaza Strip in 2017. As the reconciliation faltered, the future of PA leadership became more uncertain, and unrest grew in the West Bank over a controversial new social security program. Fatah recommended to Abbas in January 2019 that he sack the unity government. Days later Hamdallah resigned, though he remained in a caretaker role until a new government could be formed.

Hamdallah was replaced in March by Mohammad Shtayyeh, a chief negotiator of the Oslo Accords. He was the first member of Fatah to serve as prime minister since the 2006 elections, and his appointment was considered a blow to reconciliation efforts with Hamas. Shtayyeh stepped down in February 2024, five months into the Israel-Hamas War, under international pressure for broad reform in the PA.

Hopes for meaningful reform were soon dashed by the appointment of Mohammad Mustafa, a close adviser to Abbas who was seen as unlikely to challenge Abbas’s autocracy and vision. Although Mustafa set out an agenda for reform, his capacity to carry out meaningful changes was limited, in part due to a lack of international support.

Abbas faced criticism throughout his presidency for his authoritarianism and his neglect of the Gaza Strip. Apart from ruling by presidential decree after he dismissed the legislature in 2007, he remained president long after his term expired, at first claiming that he should stay an extra year in order to hold presidential and legislative elections simultaneously. But elections were continually delayed because the PA could not hold elections throughout all the Palestinian territories. Moreover, the PA occasionally cracked down on dissidents, including individuals who criticized Abbas on social media. He at times scolded or punished Hamas, seemingly without regard for the Palestinians under its governance. In 2008 he quickly condemned Hamas for its role in a conflict with Israel while he was slow to condemn Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip; in 2017, after a reconciliation agreement with Hamas faltered, he imposed sanctions on the Gaza Strip, contributing to a humanitarian crisis there that had resulted from decade-long sanctions from Israel and Egypt.

Peace process with Israel

During a summit in early 2005, Abbas and Sharon, who became Israel’s prime minister in 2001, agreed to suspend hostilities, ostensibly ending the second intifada. In September Israel completed a unilateral troop withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and the PA assumed control of the territory.

Negotiations between the PA and Israel on final status issues were renewed in November 2007, and direct negotiations continued into 2008. At the peak of the negotiations, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert—whose premiership was coming to an end amid a corruption scandal—offered Abbas more than 93 percent of the land in the West Bank, and both sides seemed to agree on principle to other key issues, including the division of Jerusalem. However, Abbas was not provided with the full details of the proposal, and he refused to sign the deal on the spot. The following day Tzipi Livni was elected to replace Olmert as party leader, but she was unable to form a coalition to take over as prime minister, and Israeli-PA negotiations stalled as Israel went to early elections. Netanyahu, who returned to the post of prime minister in 2009, refused to pick up where Abbas and Olmert had left off. Aside from two unfruitful attempts at negotiations in 2010 and 2013–14, the peace process remained largely stagnant throughout Netanyahu’s premiership.

Attempts toward unilateral statehood

After the round of direct talks between Israel and the PA in 2010 broke down, Abbas shifted his efforts toward gaining international recognition for a Palestinian state. In September 2011 he submitted a request to the UN Security Council asking for the admission of an independent Palestinian state to the UN. The action—which was opposed by Israel and the United States—had become necessary, he argued, because the U.S.-mediated peace negotiations had placed too little pressure on Israel to make concessions for peace. The bid for recognition by the Security Council stalled when it became clear that the United States would veto it and that several other members would abstain from voting.

A year after the failure of the Palestinian bid for full membership in the UN, Abbas announced that he would seek the UN General Assembly’s implicit recognition of Palestinian statehood by submitting a draft resolution requesting that the status of the Palestinian mission to the UN (officially called “Palestine” within the UN) be upgraded from “permanent observer” to “nonmember observer state.” The designation, though falling short of full UN membership, would allow the Palestinians access to international bodies and treaties that might enhance the stability and leverage of the PA. The resolution passed on November 29, 2012, with 138 countries in favor, 9 opposed, and 41 abstaining. The resolution also urged Israel and the PA to resume stalled negotiations toward a two-state solution. Israeli officials opposed Abbas’s bid for recognition, saying that such unilateral actions by the Palestinians would hold up negotiations with Israel. In April 2015 the “State of Palestine” was admitted to the International Criminal Court.

Struggling to remain afloat

In 2017 the administration of U.S. Pres. Donald Trump began developing a new peace initiative that he touted as the “ultimate deal” and the “deal of the century.” Although the PA initially received Trump and his peace initiative with optimism, relations between the PA and the United States soured in December after the latter announced that it was moving its embassy in Israel to the contested city of Jerusalem. Many perceived the action as taking sides on one of the most contentious issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Abbas announced that the PA would no longer accept U.S. mediation. In 2018 the United States, the largest donor of foreign aid to the Palestinians, began to cut funding to the PA and aid programs for the Palestinians. In September of that year, the United States ordered the closure of the PLO office in Washington, D.C., which had served as the diplomatic representative of the PA to the United States. Meanwhile, the PA suffered further deficit in 2019 when Israel began withholding some of the tax revenue it collects on behalf of the PA. The amount withheld was proportional to the welfare stipend that the PA paid each month to families of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel or killed by the IDF, a fund which Israel said incentivized terrorism. Support from Arab states also decreased in the 2010s as they faced their own financial crises during a slump in global oil prices. U.S. aid to the PA was restored in 2021 after Joe Biden took office as president.

In 2020 Israel was working on plans to annex parts of the West Bank, which would apply Israeli sovereign law on land that the PA saw as essential for a future territorially cohesive and viable Palestinian state. The plan was tabled after the surprise announcement that the United Arab Emirates had agreed to normalize relations with Israel, a deal known as the Abraham Accords that, in the months that followed, also included Bahrain and Morocco. The move nonetheless further sidelined the PA by bypassing a 2002 initiative endorsed by the Arab League that offered normalized ties between Arab states and Israel as an incentive for Israel to agree to an independent Palestinian state. Although the United Arab Emirates indicated that it would use its ties to intervene on behalf of the Palestinians, the normalization of relations removed one of the most important pieces of leverage for the PA in negotiating a Palestinian state with Israel.

The weakening of the PA created a more precarious situation for West Bank Palestinians: the PA had lost some of its most important forms of support from the international community, while Israel continued expanding its settlements and carrying out violent raids in the West Bank. Palestinians in Jerusalem were left on their own when clashes broke out in 2021. Hamas’s eventual intervention from the Gaza Strip in the form of an 11-day war with Israel, which many Palestinians considered a success, highlighted to them the incompetence of the PA in protecting either their rights or their security (although the PA does not have a right to provide security in Jerusalem according to the Oslo Accords’ interim provisions). In Jenin, Nablus, and Tulkarm, small, localized groups began to emerge in 2021 to confront Israel, both launching attacks against Israelis in Israel and fighting Israeli incursions into their cities. In 2022 the cycle of violence reached its deadliest level since the end of the second intifada (2000–05). Confrontations also took place between militants in Jenin and the PA’s security forces, which had attempted to take action against the militants there in coordination with Israel.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in the Gaza Strip launched a coordinated land, sea, and air assault in Israel that killed 1,200 people—the deadliest day for Israel since its independence—and abducted about 240 others as hostages. In the immediate aftermath the PA posted a statement on X (formerly Twitter) stating that it had “warned against the consequences of daily provocations and attacks including the continued settlers’ and occupation forces terrorism” and blamed Israel for “the destruction of the peace process.” Only after Israel launched the Israel-Hamas War in response, whose direct death toll eventually mounted into the tens of thousands, did Abbas release a statement condemning “killing civilians and abusing them on both sides.”

Although the war centered primarily on the Gaza Strip, where the PA no longer had a foothold, Israel blockaded and raided many of the parts of the West Bank that were under PA control, especially Jenin, Nablus, and Tulkarm. Israel’s finance minister, the far-right politician Bezalel Smotrich, increased Israel’s deductions to tax revenue that it collects on behalf of the PA. The move severely strained the already financially strapped PA, and the strain was exacerbated further by the loss of income for the 150,000 West Bank Palestinians who worked in Israel before October 7, most of whom were not permitted to return to work during the war. In May 2024 the World Bank warned that the PA was on the verge of collapse.