Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Al-Hamdallah Resigns

 Rami Al-Hamdallah 

Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Al-Hamdallah on Tuesday tendered his resignation to the parliaments as he opted out of unity government to President Mahmoud Abbas.

He said dealing with a blow to faltering reconciliation efforts with Gaza’s Islamist Hamas rulers, he needed to step down.

The government will continue to carry out its duties until a new one is formed, it said in a statement issued after a weekly cabinet meeting.

There was no immediate comment from Abbas, but his Fatah faction, at a meeting he chaired two days ago, recommended that the government be replaced. A Fatah faction condemned the move as an attempt to marginalize and exclude the group from Palestinian politics.

Hamdallah, a little-known academic, headed the national unity government formed in 2014 and led the West Bank-based Fatah’s reconciliation efforts with Hamas, which seized power in Gaza in 2007.

The two groups signed a reconciliation deal two years ago which set in motion a plan for Abbas’s Palestinian Authority to resume governing in Gaza and take up control of the coastal enclave’s crossing points into Egypt and Israel.

But disputes over power-sharing and disagreements over policy toward Israel have hampered the deal’s implementation.





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