A new Palestinian government in the West Bank was sworn in on
Wednesday at a ceremony in the West Bank town of Ramallah, in a move
that has angered the Hamas government in Gaza.
Ministers, including returning prime minister Salam Fayyad, took the oath of office in the presence of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.
The new 24-member cabinet will have 11 new faces and include replacements for two ministers in the outgoing government who were removed for alleged corruption.
Nabil Kassis, a former university president who like Fayyad is a political independent, will take over as finance minister. He will have to deal with fiscal challenges posed by a steady decline in donor funds and by Israeli trade restrictions.
“This government’s role is to continue what the previous one started,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told the cabinet.
The Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited self-rule in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, is relying on foreign aid to cover a 2012 budget projected to reach $1.3 billion.
Amid the crisis, the Palestinian government has been serving in a caretaker capacity since resigning last February after Abbas signed a unity deal in Doha with Hamas and announced new elections would be held within months.
But the accord with Hamas, which seized Gaza from forces loyal to Abbas’s Fatah movement in a brief civil war in 2007, ran into trouble over the composition of a unity government and is now effectively frozen.
“The legislative and executive system have been paralyzed,” Abbas told a news conference in Ramallah, the West Bank town where the new ministers were sworn in.
He said the incoming government “will be dismissed immediately” if the political partnership with Hamas is consummated.
But the Hamas government in Gaza slammed the decision to form a new cabinet, accusing Abbas’s Palestinian Authority and the Fatah movement he heads of abandoning reconciliation.
“This strengthens the division,” Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum told AFP news agency, saying it “shows clearly that the Palestinian Authority and Fatah are far from implementing” the unity agreement.
The swearing in of the 25-member government comes more than a year after the last cabinet resigned in February 2011.
At the time, the Palestinian leadership had said it would hold legislative and presidential elections “in the coming months,” and Abbas tasked Fayyad with forming a new government.
But the process was put on ice after the surprise announcement in April 2011 of a reconciliation deal between Abbas’s Fatah movement and its Islamist rival, Hamas.
Ministers, including returning prime minister Salam Fayyad, took the oath of office in the presence of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.
The new 24-member cabinet will have 11 new faces and include replacements for two ministers in the outgoing government who were removed for alleged corruption.
Nabil Kassis, a former university president who like Fayyad is a political independent, will take over as finance minister. He will have to deal with fiscal challenges posed by a steady decline in donor funds and by Israeli trade restrictions.
“This government’s role is to continue what the previous one started,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told the cabinet.
The Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited self-rule in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, is relying on foreign aid to cover a 2012 budget projected to reach $1.3 billion.
Amid the crisis, the Palestinian government has been serving in a caretaker capacity since resigning last February after Abbas signed a unity deal in Doha with Hamas and announced new elections would be held within months.
But the accord with Hamas, which seized Gaza from forces loyal to Abbas’s Fatah movement in a brief civil war in 2007, ran into trouble over the composition of a unity government and is now effectively frozen.
“The legislative and executive system have been paralyzed,” Abbas told a news conference in Ramallah, the West Bank town where the new ministers were sworn in.
He said the incoming government “will be dismissed immediately” if the political partnership with Hamas is consummated.
But the Hamas government in Gaza slammed the decision to form a new cabinet, accusing Abbas’s Palestinian Authority and the Fatah movement he heads of abandoning reconciliation.
“This strengthens the division,” Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum told AFP news agency, saying it “shows clearly that the Palestinian Authority and Fatah are far from implementing” the unity agreement.
The swearing in of the 25-member government comes more than a year after the last cabinet resigned in February 2011.
At the time, the Palestinian leadership had said it would hold legislative and presidential elections “in the coming months,” and Abbas tasked Fayyad with forming a new government.
But the process was put on ice after the surprise announcement in April 2011 of a reconciliation deal between Abbas’s Fatah movement and its Islamist rival, Hamas.
Abbas tasked prime minister Salam Fayyad with forming a new government,
but this was put on ice after the surprise announcement in April of a
reconciliation agreement between Abbas’s Fatah movement and its Islamist
rival Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip.
Since then, the reconciliation
agreement, which envisaged the creation of an interim cabinet of
independents selected by the two factions that would prepare for
elections, has largely stalled, leaving the revamped government on hold.
The agreement called for the creation of an interim cabinet of independents selected by the two factions, which would prepare for elections that were rescheduled to happen by May 2012.
The deal has largely stalled, and Abbas said on Wednesday that the impasse had left his administration paralyzed, spurring him to call for the formation of a new cabinet.
The agreement called for the creation of an interim cabinet of independents selected by the two factions, which would prepare for elections that were rescheduled to happen by May 2012.
The deal has largely stalled, and Abbas said on Wednesday that the impasse had left his administration paralyzed, spurring him to call for the formation of a new cabinet.
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