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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Hamas students celebrate West Bank varsity poll win

Palestinian students supporting Hamas celebrate a victory in student elections at Birzeit University on Thursday. — AFP
Palestinian students supporting Hamas celebrate a victory in student elections at Birzeit University on Thursday. — AFP
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RAMALLAH: Hamas supporters celebrated on Thursday a landslide student election win at a top West Bank university, results experts said further points to the group’s growing support in the occupied Palestinian territory.


Hamas’s Al Wafaa’ Islamic bloc won 28 of the 51 seats on the student council at Birzeit University, marking the first time Hamas-aligned candidates have gained control of the body.


The bloc aligned with Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas’s secular Fatah movement won just 18 seats.


The general Palestinian population has not been to the polls since 2006.


Abbas scrapped elections scheduled for last year citing Israel’s refusal to allow voting in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, which Palestinians claim as their capital. But Palestinian analysts said Abbas baulked out of fear that Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, would also trounce Fatah across the West Bank.


Birzeit’s vice-president, Ghassan al Khatib, said some saw the campus vote as “a test for measuring public opinion”, with no general elections on the horizon.


Hugh Lovatt, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the Birzeit polls were perceived as a type of bellwether because the make-up of the student body was “seen as more representative of Palestinian society”. — AFP


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