The Absence

In Deir al-Balah, a city in central Gaza that has endured nearly two years of bombardment, 70,000 people were registered to vote in the first local election held in the Gaza Strip in more than twenty years. On April 25, 15,890 of them voted. Turnout: 22.7 percent.

Hamas, which has governed Gaza since 2007, did not field candidates. The Palestine Liberation Organization required all participants to accept commitments including recognition of Israel and support for a two-state solution --- conditions Hamas could not meet without dissolving its own political identity. Hamas formally boycotted.

It did not obstruct. Hamas police secured the polling stations, surrounding each location with armed guards. Over 500 government employees helped organize the vote. Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem called the election “a positive and important step” while adding that the results had no bearing on national issues.

The Fatah-backed Nahdat Deir al-Balah list won six of fifteen seats. A list widely understood as Hamas-aligned won two. The remaining seven went to two independent lists. From this, Fatah declared a “sweeping victory” across both territories.

In the occupied West Bank, 183 municipalities held elections on the same day. Turnout was approximately 53 percent --- within the historical range of 53.7 percent in 2012, 53.8 in 2017, and 58 in 2022. No degradation. No surge. The institutional machinery ran and the population engaged with it at the rate it has engaged for a decade.

But 197 of the local bodies --- 42 municipal councils and 155 village councils --- were filled by acclamation, a process in which a single candidate list wins automatically because no competitor submitted. In Ramallah, no one ran against the Fatah list. In Nablus, the same. Historically used in small villages where extended families agreed on representation, the mechanism is now being applied in PA strongholds where Fatah mobilization has discouraged challengers.

Fatah announced it had “formed 197 municipal and village councils by consensus” in coordination with national factions and local institutions. This is technically accurate. It is also a description of uncontested power presented as democratic achievement.

The man claiming the victory is ninety years old. Mahmoud Abbas was elected president in January 2005 for a four-year term. The term expired in January 2009. He has governed seventeen years beyond his mandate. No presidential election has been held. No legislative election since 2006. Abbas declared 2026 the “year of Palestinian democracy.”

The Central Elections Commission chair, Rami Hamdallah, was explicit about the standard: “Simply holding them was a major achievement.” He is correct. In a territory under military occupation, with fragmented governance, limited sovereignty, and a population divided between two political authorities that last competed electorally twenty years ago, the fact that elections happened at all is not trivial. The institutional infrastructure survived. Ballots were printed, polling stations opened, results tabulated. The machinery works.

What the machinery proved is the question.

In Deir al-Balah, 77.3 percent of registered voters did not vote. The Central Elections Commission cited large-scale displacement and outdated civil registry records. Most of the absent were not boycotting. They were not making a political statement. They were displaced --- physically unable to reach a polling station in a city that has been bombed for two years, registered on voter rolls that reflect addresses that may no longer exist.

This is the interpretive problem. The 23 percent turnout is simultaneously a measure of destruction and a measure of delegitimacy, and the two cannot be cleanly separated. A displaced person who cannot vote is not expressing a political preference. But the election that proceeds without them is claiming a mandate from their absence. When Fatah announces a sweeping victory across both territories, the 54,110 people who did not vote in Deir al-Balah are counted as the denominator of a percentage, not as the population whose consent was never obtained.

Palestinian activist Marwan Ennabi told the Associated Press: “This isn’t transparency. This is chaos.”

Hamas understood all of this. Its strategic calculation was precise: boycott without obstruction. Do not participate, which would require accepting conditions that dissolve your identity. Do not block, which would produce images of Hamas suppressing democracy. Secure the polling stations. Call the results positive. Let the turnout number say what you chose not to say.

Qassem’s two statements contain the entire position. Holding elections is “a positive and important step.” The results have “no bearing on national issues.” Both are true simultaneously. The elections are real and they are local. The PA can govern municipalities. Whether it can govern Gaza --- whether anyone can govern Gaza after what Gaza has endured --- is a question these elections were not designed to answer and did not.

The most effective political act Hamas performed on April 25 was the act it did not perform. It did not need a counter-campaign. The 77 percent did the work.

On April 1, the Israeli security cabinet approved 34 new settlements in the occupied West Bank --- the largest single-session settlement authorization in Israeli history, bringing the total approved by this government past one hundred. The decision was classified under the military censor for nine days. In The Classification, I wrote about the nine-day window: a man named Alaa Khaled Subeih, a school janitor who owned a plastic greenhouse in Tayasir, was killed by settlers under army protection during the period when the decision authorizing expansion around him was administratively real and publicly secret.

Twenty-four days after the 34 settlements were approved, Palestinians voted in the municipalities those settlements are designed to absorb. The elections demonstrate political activity. The settlements demonstrate territorial consumption. These two processes operate in different registers, on different timescales, administered by different authorities. They do not interact. The PA wins seats in Hebron. The settlement south of Hebron does not notice.

IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir warned the cabinet that the army would “collapse” under the manpower burden of protecting settlements across the West Bank. The cabinet approved the plan over his objection. The elections held three weeks later took place in the territory whose geographic future the cabinet had already decided without asking the population that just voted.

The PA demonstrated institutional survival in the territory it already controls. The West Bank turnout is within historical range. The councils that were contested produced results. The 53 percent who voted participated in a real democratic exercise under occupation, and that participation is not nothing.

In the one territory where the PA needs to demonstrate governance capacity to matter for any post-conflict settlement --- Gaza --- it held one election in one city and claimed a sweep on 23 percent turnout, in a population where three-quarters of the registered voters were absent not because they chose to be but because the conditions of their existence made presence impossible.

The sweeping victory is six seats out of fifteen, in a city of displaced persons, in a strip where no other municipality was permitted to vote, claimed by a president seventeen years past his mandate, on a day when 54,110 registered voters in Deir al-Balah did not appear --- most of them not because they refused, but because they were somewhere else, in a place that used to be where they lived, which is not where it was.

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