Abbas 'not to seek re-election'

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has said he will not seek re-election when elections are held in January, Palestinian officials said.

“The president insists on not running in the upcoming election,” an official from the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) executive committee said on Thursday.

Another PLO official said Abbas will give a speech later on Thursday explaining his decision not to run.

Abbas recenty issued a decree announcing that presidential and parliamentary polls would take place on January 24.

But the Hamas-run interior ministry in the Gaza Strip ordered Palestinians in the territory not to take part in elections.

The interior ministry said in a statement the elections had been called “by figures who do not have the right to declare it”.

Ehab Al-Ghsain, a Hamas interior ministry spokesman, said that Gazan officials had been instructed not to co-operate with Abbas’s efforts to stage the vote.

Source: AlJazeera