Election committee to start Gaza work this week

Palestinian election officials will begin work on updating the electoral register in the Gaza Strip on Monday in a key step to pave the way for elections, an official told AFP on Sunday. On May 20, senior Fatah and Hamas officials agreed that the Palestinian electoral commission would start work in Gaza on May 27 and that consultations to forum a new interim "government of independents" would start the same day. But Jamil Khaldi, head of the Central Elections Commission (CEC) in Gaza, said work would only begin on Monday after the arrival of his West Bank counterpart, Hanna Nasser. "Nothing will happen today. The CEC delegation led by Hanna Nasser will arrive in Gaza on Monday and we will all have a meeting with (Hamas) prime minister Ismail Haniya. Immediately afterwards, we will start our work," he told AFP. Discussions over a new government, which were also to start on Sunday, have been put on hold, with officials saying it was not clear when they would start. "We don't have a date as to when the discussions about the new government will start," said Fawzi Barhum, spokesman for the Islamist Hamas movement which rules the Gaza Strip. Under the terms of a reconciliation deal signed by Hamas and Fatah in Cairo on May 3, 2011, the two factions were to put together a caretaker cabinet of independent technocrats tasked with preparing for presidential and legislative elections within a year of the signing of the accord. But the rival factions never managed to agree on the makeup of the interim government, meaning preparations for holding elections have never got off the ground. The last time the Palestinians held elections was in 2006, and since then, the electoral register in Gaza has not been updated, despite various attempts to do so.