Court allows Fatah to merge Palestinian election lists

Palestinian election authorities cleared the way on Monday for the ruling Fatah movement to merge rival lists of candidates for a January parliamentary ballot, thus ending a damaging split.

Rivals in Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas' ruling movement had presented two candidate lists, then decided they wanted to merge them into one as a way to counter a challenge from surging rival Hamas.

The ruling of the electoral court was needed because the official deadline for registering candidates was December 14. After an appeal, the court said it would reopen registration for a further six hours. It was not immediately clear when the six hours would begin.

The justification was that operations were suspended for six hours by the elections commission during the registration process to protest attacks by gunmen on its offices. The gunmen were from Fatah.

The disgruntled "young guard" of Fatah, led by Marwan Barghouti who is currently serving five life sentences in an Israeli jail, broke away from the party earlier this month in protest of the corruption-tainted old guard. Eager to bring the bloc back into the fold, Abbas agreed to award top slots to many of the younger activists who had done well in Fatah primaries.

The decision to merge the two lists was taken in order to weaken Hamas after the group's strong showings in the primaries.

Hamas was boosted ahead of the election by the division in Fatah - one of the gravest crises in its 40-year history.

Polls show Fatah might get more than 45 percent if it united but could fall to 21 percent if it remained split.

Hamas, running for the first time in the legislative elections, gets 31 percent of the Palestinian public's support and the most seats in parliament, according to a poll released Monday.

The poll, conducted by An-Najah University in the West Bank city of Nablus, was conducted before the reunification of Fatah.

According to the survey, 27 percent of the public would choose a bloc headed by Barghouti, and only 18 percent would choose Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah. The poll surveyed 1,361 people with a margin of error of three percentage points.

	PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas attending midnight Christmas Mass in Bethlehem on Sunday. (Archive)