Palestinian Prime Minister submits resignation

DUBAI, Feb 26 -  Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh and his government have submitted their resignations, he announced Monday.

“I would like to inform the honorable council and our great people that I placed the government’s resignation at the disposal of Mr. President (Mahmoud Abbas), last Tuesday, and today I submit it in writing,” Shtayyeh said in a post on Facebook.

The resignation comes as the Palestinian Authority (PA), which is seen as corrupt, comes under intense pressure from the United States to reform and improve its governance in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The PA was set up in the mid-1990s as a temporary government pending Palestinian independence after the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Accords with Israel. It is headquarters in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah and exercises nominal self-rule in parts of the territory.

The government, which is dominated by the Fatah political party, held administrative control over Gaza until 2007, after Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections in the occupied territories and expelled it from the strip. Israel has rejected the prospect of the PA returning to Gaza after the war, and has dismissed the idea of establishing a Palestinian state in the territories.

The US however favors a reformed PA being in control of both the West Bank and Gaza as part of a future independent state.

Shtayyeh, who was appointed as prime minister in 2019, told CNN in October that there can be no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without the United States, but added that the current US administration doesn’t have the political will to end the conflict. “They’re managing it,” he said.