Rawhi Fattouh, 75, will temporarily replace Mahmoud Abbas in case of the death of the octogenarian leader of the Palestinian Authority, Ramallah announced on Wednesday, two weeks after Abbas’s 89th birthday.
The P.A.’s official Wafa news agency reported that Abbas on Wednesday signed a declaration that should his position become vacant, Fattouh will serve as the organization’s supreme leader “pending the holding of presidential elections as per the Palestinian Elections Law.”
Abbas claimed that he issued the order in an attempt to “maintain stability” during a period in which the P.A. was “facing many challenges.”
The last election for the position of P.A. chief was in 2006, which means Abbas is currently in the 20th year of his original four-year term.
Fattouh, a longtime Abbas confidant who now leads the Palestinian National Council—the legislative body of the Palestine Liberation Organization—served as P.A. interim chief after Yasser Arafat’s death in November 2004.
Born in 1949 in the Gaza Strip, Israeli analysts have considered the P.A. official “dull and lacking political influence or ability to actually rule.”
In March 2008, Israeli border guards caught Fattouh with 3,000 cell phones in his car, which he tried to smuggle from Jordan into Judea and Samaria using his Israeli-issued entry permit. The incident reportedly “enraged” Abbas, and he banned Fattouh from entering his offices.
Last year, then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant revoked Fattouh’s VIP entry permit after he paid a visit to a released Palestinian terrorist who served decades in jail for killing a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces.
Karim Younis murdered IDF Cpl. Avraham Bromberg in the Golan Heights in 1980. He was sentenced to life in prison in 1983, but in 2012 then-Israeli President Shimon Peres commuted his term to 40 years.
Also in 2023, Fattouh said Arabs had lived in Jerusalem for more than 1.5 million years, while the Jewish people had only been in the region for 6,000 years. The oldest human fossils archaeologists have found date to 300,000 years ago—1.2 million years later than Fattouh’s claim.
JNS sought comment from the U.S. State Department as to how Abbas’s decision to appoint Fattouh as his temporary successor aligns with Washington’s demands for administrative reforms by Ramallah.
