Hamas Makes Major Inroad in Balloting

RAMALLAH, West Bank —  The radical Hamas movement appeared poised Wednesday to claim more than a third of the seats in the Palestinian parliament, and may even have won a majority.

On Wednesday, the Development Studies Program of Birzeit University projected a Fatah victory, with 46.4% of the vote, in its poll. Hamas appeared to garner 39.5%, according to the poll. Two other polls indicated similar results.

Early this morning, however, some officials in both parties said Hamas appeared to have won. Preliminary results will not be available at least until later today. Kadoura Fares, a senior Fatah official and parliamentary candidate, said that he believed that Hamas had won a majority. He declined to specify how he had reached that conclusion.

If the exit poll margin holds, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party will claim 63 of 132 legislative seats, and Hamas will take 58, the pollsters said. The remaining seats are likely to be scattered among a handful of leftist and independent parties that could play kingmaker roles in shaping the next government.

The showing by Hamas will change the face of Palestinian politics by giving the Islamic movement a formal place in the governmental structure for the first time since the Palestinian Authority was formed in 1994.

A government that includes Hamas, which has been responsible for numerous suicide bombings and attacks against Israelis, will present problems for negotiations with Israel, which has demanded that the party renounce violence and its vow to destroy the Jewish state.

The four partners in Mideast negotiations -- the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia -- issued a statement in December saying any Palestinian Cabinet “should include no member who is not committed to the principles of Israel’s right to exist in peace and security and an unequivocal end to violence and terrorism.”

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack on Wednesday said that policy still applied.

President Bush, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal before polls closed Wednesday, painted the U.S. stance in stark terms. “Not until you renounce your desire to destroy Israel will we deal with you,” he told the newspaper.

Amid tight security, balloting was for the most part orderly and turnout high, officials said. About 78% of the nearly 1.4 million eligible voters took part, election officials said.

Armed groups kept their promise to maintain calm during the voting, which carried a festival-like atmosphere. Scarved women, men in baseball caps and eager schoolchildren clogged the entrances to polling places, shoving leaflets from the 11 parties into voters’ hands.

Vivid campaign banners canopied many streets around the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and posters bearing candidate photographs seemed to cover every surface, from the sides of buildings to the trunks of palm trees.

The exit poll projections suggested that Fatah would need the help of smaller secular parties to keep its control of the government.

If Hamas didn’t win a majority, Abbas, who would be responsible for naming a prime minister and helping to assemble the next government within five weeks, has said he would not include Hamas as long as it refused to recognize Israel. Hamas’ leaders said before the election that they would await vote results before making a decision about whether to seek Cabinet positions or remain an opposition force.

Ali Jarbawi, a political science professor at Birzeit University who was not involved in the exit poll, said that if Hamas did not win a majority of seats, it probably would opt to remain in the opposition.

“We have a polarized system. Hamas has shown a very strong showing in the election. The government is going to be a Fatah coalition, with smaller parties and independents,” Jarbawi said late Wednesday. “We’re going to have a very strong opposition.”

The presence of the Islamic group in the Palestinian government could pose a dilemma for the Bush administration, which classifies Hamas as a terrorist organization and has refused to have dealings with it. A congressional resolution passed last month warned that U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority could be jeopardized if Hamas joined the government before renouncing violence. European Union officials made a similar threat.

For its part, Israel has said it will not negotiate with members of a movement that it defines as a terrorist group. Hamas is sworn to Israel’s destruction and its military wing has carried out dozens of suicide bombings and other attacks since the outbreak of hostilities in 2000.

Israel had no comment on the vote projections, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said.

Abbas has expressed hope that Hamas will be tempered by involvement in mainstream Palestinian politics, but he is likely to come under increased pressure from Israel and the international community to disarm the group, and other militias.

Campaign activity was banned on election day, but at nearly every polling place, voters were met by a forest of fluttering flags -- green for Hamas and yellow for Fatah. Cars and vans were plastered with campaign signs as they dropped voters at the polls.

The vote was mainly calm, with weaponry kept largely out of sight even in urban enclaves where gunmen often strut about freely. In Gaza City, armed men could be seen handing their guns off to comrades or stashing them in car trunks before entering polling places -- and reclaiming them as soon as they had cast their ballots.

Inside the polling places, election workers seated at long wooden tables leafed through sheaves of documents, painstakingly checking the names of those who came to vote. All voters dipped their right forefingers into plastic bottles of indelible ink, leaving their fingertips stained a deep indigo.

Voters were handed two ballots -- one national and one local -- and given a brief but careful explanation on filling them out. Then they slipped behind cardboard partitions to mark the ballots and dropped them into big Tupperware-style containers.

It was a ritual that has grown familiar in the last year or so, after elections for Palestinian Authority president last January and a series of municipal elections that began shortly before that and has continued since.

One gesture was seen again and again throughout the day: When people were asked whom they voted for and why, many held up an ink-stained forefinger as they spoke, waggling it for emphasis -- then smiled when they caught a glimpse of it.

“We are exercising this important right, because we hope to live in peace; I want that for my little ones,” said Gaza homemaker Wijdan Diab. Her curly-haired 8-year-old daughter, Mira, clung to her long robes.

Both sides worked to get the vote out, though Hamas appeared to have the organizational edge. Female campaign workers from Hamas, swathed in head-to-toe black veils, knocked on doors offering to escort women to polling places. Hamas also used minibuses to ferry voters to the polls, particularly the ill and infirm.

With temperatures dropping under leaden skies, vendors who set up shop outside polling stations did a brisk trade in piping-hot falafel, cooked beans and stewed meat. Enterprising boys made the rounds among waiting voters with containers of hot coffee and plastic cups. At one Ramallah polling station, a man peddled wooden flutes for the equivalent of a dollar.

“This is a historic day for Palestinians -- this is a great day,” Ismail Haniya, who topped Hamas’ slate of candidates, said after casting his ballot in Gaza’s Shati refugee camp, his home district.

For many in Gaza, the vote took on added significance, coming just five months after Israel’s withdrawal of troops and Jewish settlers from the territory. In the village of Zahara, the polling place was just across a rutted road from the former Jewish settlement of Netzarim, now reduced to heaps of rubble.

“Before, when they were there with their tanks and watchtowers, we couldn’t even safely leave our homes,” said 20-year-old Mahmoud Ahmad, who cast his ballot for Fatah. “Our lives are better now, but we still have many problems.”

The election marked several firsts for Palestinians, who had not picked lawmakers since 1996. It was the first time Hamas sought legislative seats, after years of rejecting the Palestinian Authority. The campaign also marked the first serious challenge to the longtime dominance of Fatah, which has been weakened by internal rivalries since the death of its former leader, Yasser Arafat.

Fatah’s troubles came to a head in November, when a bloc of activists in their 40s defied the old guard by announcing its own list of candidates. A split was averted through the creation of a compromise list, headed by jailed uprising leader Marwan Barghouti, but the episode underscored Abbas’ inability to hold the movement’s disparate factions together as Arafat once did.

Fatah voters said Wednesday that the movement was going through changes that would make it stronger. Some who voted for Fatah conceded that the party had made mistakes but deserved another chance because it had honored Palestinians through its longtime quest for an independent state.

Fatah supporter Ihab Sumreen, a 32-year-old municipal inspector in the West Bank city of Al Birah, next to Ramallah, said he feared that a powerful showing by Hamas could taint the Palestinians’ image to the rest of the world.

“We will be the terrorists for the world,” Sumreen said outside a polling place in Al Birah, where Hamas won a majority on the local council last month.

Hamas’ campaign sought to capitalize on public discontent with the Palestinian Authority, which many Palestinians have come to see as corrupt and unable to control a climate of lawlessness that has swept over streets. By contrast, Hamas, which gives aid to the poor and runs a broad network of schools and medical clinics, has a reputation as honest, disciplined and less prone to cronyism.

Wearing a Hamas baseball hat outside an Al Birah school, construction worker Ahmed Khalil said Fatah had squandered its time in power.

“After 11 years, many people want to change the situation they are in. There are robberies, theft. Unemployment increased. [Fatah leaders] haven’t done any projects for people to work,” said Khalil, 30, who is married with two children.

But Khalil said the ideal role for Hamas would be to serve as a watchdog based inside the parliament, rather than in charge of the Palestinian Authority.

“I think it will monitor those who form the government,” he said. “We want someone to act as a deterrent to Fatah.”

Hamas already made significant inroads into Palestinian politics with surprisingly strong showings in the municipal elections. Public dissatisfaction produced near sweeps for Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and helped propel it to surprisingly big upsets in West Bank communities, such as Nablus, that were once seen as Fatah strongholds.

During the latest campaign, Hamas candidates promised cleaner, more effective government, but they were vague about their policy aims. The party’s leaders said they would not recognize Israel, but appeared to leave the door open to future negotiations, perhaps through a third party.

The long-delayed elections were postponed most recently in July. Many Fatah members urged Abbas to delay balloting again out of fear their party might lose.

Others worried that Palestinian forces might be unable to ensure orderly balloting.

Abbas, who staked much in pushing for Hamas to be included in the elections, forged ahead with the vote after Israel relented on its threat to bar Palestinians in East Jerusalem from voting in their neighborhood. Israel agreed to allow 6,300 Palestinians to cast ballots at a handful of Israeli post offices in East Jerusalem, an arrangement similar to that in place during the 1996 vote and during the presidential election last year.

Ellingwood reported from Ramallah and King from Gaza City.