Hamas popularity on the rise: poll
Middle East Desk Report

RAMALLAH (West Bank)—The popularity of Hamas has risen in recent months since the Gaza Strip’s border breach with Egypt, deadly Israeli strikes and the lack of progress in renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, according to an opinion poll released on Monday.
“A major shift in Hamas’s favour occurred during the last three months with about 10 percent of the population shifting their attitudes and perceptions,” said the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research in a statement accompanying the results.
The same number of people would vote for moderate Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas as for senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniya in any presidential election and the Islamists would get more votes than Fatah in legislative polls, it said.
Abbas, who succeeded legendary leader Yasser Arafat at the head of the Palestinian Authority in January 2005, would receive 46 percent of votes, compared with 47 percent for Haniya. It is the first poll in which an Islamist candidate has garnered more support than the secular leader.
Haniya served as prime minister in the Hamas-led unity government that Abbas fired in June 2007 after the Islamists routed his forces in the Gaza Strip following a week of deadly clashes. The Hamas leader would not fare as well against Marwan Barghuti, the popular West Bank leader of Abbas’s Fatah party and architect of the 2000 uprising who is imprisoned by Israel for his involvement in suicide attacks.
Barghuti would receive 57 percent of the vote, while Haniya would get 38 percent, the poll said. In legislative elections, Hamas would receive 42 percent of the vote, compared with 35 percent for Fatah — a near mirror reversal of the figures from a December poll, in which 31 percent would have voted for Hamas and 49 percent for Fatah.
The rise in Hamas’s popularity is partly due to the recent breach of Gaza’s border with Egypt and the high number of Palestinian casualties in Israeli strikes on the coastal strip, the poll said. Abbas meanwhile has been hurt by the lack of an improvement in Palestinians’ daily lives amid the renewed peace talks with Israelis, it said. “These developments managed to present Hamas as successful in breaking the siege (on Gaza) and as a victim of Israeli attacks,” it said. “These also presented Palestinian president Abbas and his Fatah faction as impotent, unable to change the bitter reality in the West Bank or ending Israeli occupation through diplomacy,” it said.
Fifty-six percent of those questioned said they were “unsatisfied” with Abbas, compared with 41 percent who said they were satisfied. The survey questioned 1,270 people in the West Bank and Gaza between March 13 and 15 and had a three-percent margin of error.
Top Israeli and Palestinian negotiators are to meet on Monday evening for the first time since the Palestinians suspended talks after an Israeli blitz on Gaza, an official said.
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and former Palestinian premier Ahmed Qorei are to hold talks in Jerusalem around 1500 GMT, the senior Palestinian official told AFP on condition of anonymity. The last time the two met was on February 19, when Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and president Mahmud Abbas chaired a session of the Middle East peace talks renewed in late November to great fanfare under US stewardship.