Abbas succession war could ‘collapse’ PA

The future battle to succeed Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas could trigger “mass protest, repression” and the outright collapse of the Palestinian Authority, the International Crisis Group (ICG) said yesterday.

The think tank released its forecast a day after the ageing and increasingly unpopular 87-year-old Abbas met in Ramallah with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was in the region to urge calm amid a spike in IsraeliPalestinian violence.

Given Mr Abbas’s age and persistent rumours about his poor health, speculation on his successor is common in the occupied West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority (PA) is based.

The Brussels-based ICG predicted in its report that “elections based on legal procedures” were “the least likely” outcome when Mr Abbas vacates the presidency.

Mr Abbas heads the PA, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Fatah, the secular political movement founded by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

He was elected president after Arafat died in 2004. Palestinians have had no presidential elections since.

The report says Mr Abbas, who has been unwilling to designate a successor, has also “hollowed out or disabled the institutions and procedures that would otherwise decide who will take his place”.

It is therefore “unclear who will succeed him, and by what process”, ICG said, warning of a possible “descent into mass protest, repression, violence and even the PA’s collapse”.

According to the report, any lastditch effort to name a successor to ease a transition process “would go awry”.

Mr Abbas has repeatedly called off plans to hold presidential polls, as recently as 2021 when he scrapped scheduled elections citing Israel’s refusal to allow voting in annexed east Jerusalem. Experts suspected Mr Abbas backed away over fears Fatah would be trounced by Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip.