ABU DHABI—The Palestinian elections currently set for September 11, 2027, will arrive after two years in which diplomacy has multiplied while Palestinian control has not. In 2025, a wave of countries recognizing Palestine as a state improved Palestinians’ standing in international law. At the same time, United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803, adopted that November, endorsed the Comprehensive Plan for Gaza. This resolution supported the Trump administration’s Board of Peace as a transitional administration for Gaza until the end of 2027, and it recognized that the plan could create the conditions for statehood to follow.
None of it, however, has given Palestinians the authority to command their own security forces or to control the bulk of their revenue. Most decisions about Palestinians’ future are still taken by others. Next year’s election could bring new leaders, but unless they are able to control Palestinian finances and security and unite the institutions of Gaza with those of the West Bank, then outside powers will continue to negotiate opposite a leadership that cannot carry out what it agrees to.
Palestinians’ predicament
The obstacles to creating such a government are already evident. In July 2026, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, whose mandate expired nearly eighteen years ago, decreed that legislative elections should take place on November 28, 2026. He also expanded the Legislative Council, from 132 to two-hundred seats, and he required candidates to pledge support for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), its political program, and the international resolutions it has accepted. The decree appears aimed primarily at managing Abbas’s succession, but Hamas and several other factions rejected that pledge. On October 10, the legislative vote was postponed and rescheduled to coincide with the presidential election next September. In explaining moving the election, PLO leadership cited Israeli raids, settler violence, withheld tax revenues, and Israel’s refusal to admit election materials and observers into Gaza and East Jerusalem; four days earlier, Israel had barred Palestinian election officials from both territories. In addition, voter rolls are out of date, and Gaza remains in disarray.
But the Palestinian Authority’s weakness goes deeper than the electoral calendar. Israel collects and can withhold the clearance revenues that form the largest share of the Authority’s income, leaving it close to bankruptcy. Security coordination with Israel continues as before. The Authority depends on it, but that cooperation also undermines its credibility with many Palestinians. Separate payrolls and armed groups sustain the split between Ramallah and Gaza. The new arrangements for Gaza add a third layer. The National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, the technocratic body that answers to the Board of Peace rather than to Ramallah, has its own finance and interior portfolios, so the structure meant to end the split could instead formalize it.
For sixteen years, Israel treated that schism as a strategic advantage, tolerating Hamas rule in Gaza and at times facilitating its funding to weaken the Authority. While Israel has just held its own elections, there is no indication its politics will change. The current Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, repeatedly vowed to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state in Gaza or the West Bank on his watch; no plausible alternative coalition, including one formed around Netanyahu’s main challenger, Gadi Eisenkot, is being built on a different premise. The E1 tenders for 3,401 housing units east of Jerusalem threaten to sever the land linking Ramallah to Bethlehem, and with it the territorial contiguity on which any statehood plan depends. Palestinian institutions have protested, but they have no way to stop the construction.
Diplomatic advances and setbacks
While the 1979 and 1994 treaties formalized peace and ended the state of war with Egypt and with Jordan, they did not generate a warm peace or unleash business and people-to-people relations because of the impasse in Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking efforts. More recently, the Abraham Accords, launched during the first Trump administration, were built on the idea that Arab-Israeli relations could advance separately based on shared threats and economic interests and without Palestinian consent. The Accords have found success in several areas, but there remain limits to this approach, as the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel and the 2026 war with Iran have revealed. A population under occupation and blockade remains a persistent source of strategic instability in the region that third parties can exploit, as Tehran did when it recast itself as a patron of the Palestinian cause.
Hamas’s attack, Israel’s subsequent disproportionate and excessive retaliation, and the chaos that followed stemmed from that earlier failure to thoroughly address the Palestinian question. And the consequences of that failure continue to play out. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has argued that Iran, not the Palestinian question, is now the number one driver of instability. It is accurate that, for the time being, the Palestinian issue may no longer determine regional alignments. But delay still raises the cost of any settlement, and the question is likely to return to the forefront of regional diplomacy once the war in Iran ends.
Arab governments have always weighed the Palestinian cause against their own national interests. But that has never meant that they were ready to give it up. Saudi Arabia, for example, still refuses to normalize relations with Israel unless there is a path to a Palestinian state. For Jordan, the question remains existential.
A path forward for Palestinians
A single elected government in charge of both money and security would change this situation.
So, what would need to happen to make that happen? To begin with, the rival payrolls would be consolidated under one budget, managed by one finance ministry. Then, armed groups would need to answer to a single command under that government, giving it the authority to keep order and carry out what it agrees to. Next, losing factions would need to accept the 2027 election results and dismantle their parallel institutions, instead of keeping them as a way to block decisions. The Board of Peace would need to stay temporary, in practice as well as on paper, and hand over its powers on a fixed schedule to the government elected in 2027 for both territories, not to a separate authority for Gaza. That means treating the Gaza committee as a transitional administration of one part of a single Palestinian polity: its finances should run through the same treasury as those of the Authority, its staff should move onto a unified payroll, and its mandate should end when the new government takes office. Together, these steps would strengthen Palestinian institutions, and their ability to exercise authority by making them less dependent on revenue controlled by others. These actions would also make it harder for factions or their foreign backers to obstruct agreements and give future negotiators a partner that can make commitments and keep them.
Importantly, whether that consolidation happens depends on choices Palestinians make before the vote next year. The Palestinian Authority will not make these changes of its own volition because its leadership draws its power from the very arrangements such reforms would dismantle: separate patronage payrolls, an executive without an electoral mandate, and a succession managed by decree. What can move it is the one thing the Authority cannot do without: the money that pays its salaries.
Gulf and European donors, who already fund a large part of the Authority’s budget, should release that support in tranches tied to verified steps. Conditions should include the creation of a single payroll audited by the World Bank, a unified chain of command for the security forces, and a signed undertaking by Fatah, Hamas, and the other factions, brokered by Egypt and guaranteed by Arab states, to accept the 2027 results. At the same time, Washington should press Israel to release withheld clearance revenues on the same timetable. If Abbas remains in office, that pressure must be applied now, and sustained through the election. If he does not, these commitments must be a condition of endorsing any successor, secured before the transition rather than after it. If those commitments are not fixed before Abbas leaves the scene, the transition will be settled by the security services and whoever controls the payroll, not by Palestinian voters.
Alongside this financial pressure, the major Palestinian factions need advance agreements on institutional arrangements that will govern the transition. A unified fiscal system and a single security command would ensure that the winner inherits working institutions rather than a contest for control. Most immediately, the voter rolls need to be updated, and access for election administration in Gaza and East Jerusalem must be negotiated and secured. Losing parties must commit in advance to dismantle their separate payrolls and armed wings once results are certified. Participation rules can be widened beyond the July pledge without discarding the existing diplomatic framework. Decisions on money, force, and acceptance of the results, however, cannot wait for the vote count. If they do, the elections are more likely to confirm current divisions than end them.
How the Gulf and the US factor in
Outside parties can shape the incentives for those decisions, but they cannot make them on behalf of Palestinians. The next diplomatic effort will fail if it places all the risk on Palestinians. It must bring unilateral Israeli measures in Gaza and the West Bank to a halt and press Israel to support improvements in Palestinian lives and livelihoods. It should also draw investment into sectors that neighboring states cannot afford to see collapse, such as maritime security, energy corridors, and cross-border infrastructure, giving those states a direct stake in the outcome. Much of that investment would likely come from the Gulf. Without Gulf funding, Gaza’s reconstruction would stall and the Authority’s budget would struggle to recover. Donors could tie the release of those funds to measurable progress toward the aforementioned reforms, with each step subject to verification. Few other regional funding sources can attach such conditions.
Washington cannot create a Palestinian leadership. It can determine whether Israel bears consequences for closing off the territory it occupies and blocking electoral access. And it can control whether the Board of Peace remains transitional or hardens into a lasting trusteeship.
Regional stability and calm require committed political leadership on both sides: a coalition in Israel willing to serve as a peace partner and a renewed, reformed Palestinian leadership backed by functioning institutions.