The Split: Gaza and Ramallah

The rupture did not begin with gunfire. It began in January 2006, when Hamas won the Palestinian legislative election and the governments funding the Palestinian Authority declined to deal with the cabinet that resulted. The United States and the European Union classified Hamas as a terrorist organization and refused to recognize it as the legitimate winner; sanctions followed, and the security forces — overwhelmingly Fatah in composition, answerable to the presidency rather than to the cabinet — found themselves policing a government their own leadership regarded as illegitimate. The Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question records that after the Israeli evacuation of settlers from Gaza in September 2005 this polarization “became more extreme and was reflected in a growing state of lawlessness and lack of security, with recurring armed clashes between Palestinian policemen and Hamas fighters.”

Through the second half of 2006 the two movements negotiated in public and shot at each other in the street. Egypt and Qatar sent foreign ministers; Islamic Jihad and the PFLP mediated; in November both sides agreed to form a unity government, and in December Mahmoud Abbas called for new elections instead. In February 2007, with fighting in Gaza intensifying and Hamas overrunning compounds used by Abbas’s security forces, Saudi Arabia brokered the Mecca Agreement. Ismail Haniyeh resigned and was reappointed, and in March a national unity government took office. It lasted about three months.

In June 2007 the Battle of Gaza ended with Hamas in full military and political control of the Strip and Fatah retaining the occupied West Bank. At least a hundred people were killed in the fighting. On 14 June Abbas dissolved the unity government and declared a state of emergency, and a cabinet appointed from Ramallah began governing the territory the occupation left to it. Israel imposed the comprehensive land, sea and air blockade of Gaza that has defined the enclave ever since.

What followed was not an emergency but a settled fracture: two administrations, two civil services, two claims to speak for a people whose territory was in any case not contiguous. The division also handed every external actor a standing excuse — there could be no settlement, it was said, with a leadership that did not control its own ground, an argument that grew more convenient the longer the split endured.

Reconciliation was attempted and attempted again. Abbas and Khalid Mishal signed a unity deal in Cairo on 4 May 2011. A further agreement collapsed in 2014, after which Hamas formed an administrative committee to run Gaza; in 2017 it dissolved that committee under Egyptian pressure in order to empower a unity government. Hamas pressed for the general elections that Abbas cancelled in 2021, and signed a further reconciliation accord in Algiers in 2022. None of it produced a single Palestinian government. Nineteen years after the split, the 2006 legislature remains the last Palestinian parliament chosen in a contested vote.

Sources

• The Islamic Resistance Movement – Hamas — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest), Institute for Palestine Studies
• Timeline: Hamas–Fatah conflict — Al Jazeera, 4 May 2011
• Timeline: 20 years of Hamas rule in Gaza, from election to political exit — Al Jazeera, 8 July 2026