A Palestinian student group affiliated with the Palestinian Authority’s ruling Fatah party beats the student group aligned with Hamas in elections at the largest Palestinian university in the West Bank.
In the student elections at An-Najah University in Nablus, Fatah’s party takes 41 seats, Hamas’s party takes 34, while a number of left-wing groups take a total of 6 seats.
The win for Fatah’s Shabiba party represents a turnaround from recent years that saw Hamas’s Islamic bloc party winning major university elections, especially in Ramallah’s Birzeit University.
Student elections are seen by analysts as a barometer of Palestinian street opinion in the absence of any Palestinian elections that included Hamas since 2006.
The dean of student affairs at the university, Musa Abu Dayya, tells the official Palestinian Authority news site Wafa that of the 20,237 students eligible to vote, a total of 11,765 (58%) cast their ballots. The last student elections in An-Najjah took place in 2013.
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From the Liveblog of
Tuesday, April 18, 2017
