PA: No elections if Israel bans voting in Jerusalem

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"The Palestinian Authority will cancel Jan. 25 parliamentary elections if Israel goes ahead with its plan to bar Jerusalem Palestinians from voting, Information Minister Nabil Shaath said Wednesday.

"If the Israelis insist on not allowing us to conduct the elections in Jerusalem, then there will be no elections at all," Shaath said.

Senior Israeli officials told Veronique de Keyser, who heads a delegation of European election observers, that Israel will bar Palestinians in Jerusalem from voting in Jerusalem for the January 25 Palestinian Authority legislative election because of the participation of Hamas.

In previous elections, Palestinian residents of Jerusalem voted by mailing their ballots from Jerusalem post offices or driving to polling stations in nearby West Bank suburbs.

However, a senior Israeli official told the Associatedn Press on Wednesday that this time, no voting would take place in the city, even via post offices."

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Israel to bar voting in East Jerusalem

By Aluf Benn

Israel will not enable voting for the Palestinian Authority's legislative election to take place in East Jerusalem because of Hamas's participation, senior Israeli officials told Veronique de Keyser, who heads a delegation of European election observers.

The officials said this week that because Israel objects to Hamas's participation in the election, it is therefore not willing to allow voting to take place in sovereign Israeli territory.

According to the Oslo Accords, Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem are allowed to vote in PA elections via their local post offices. This arrangement was used both in the last legislative election in 1996, and in the PA's leadership contest earlier this year, and the PA would like to use it again during the upcoming legislative election on January 25.

Israeli officials believe that the PA may use Israel's opposition to balloting in Jerusalem as a pretext for postponing the elections, as PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is already under growing pressure from his own party to do so.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/660379.html

Or is that only where the oil is?

Palestinian elections threatened: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4548282.stm