THE battle lines for control of the Palestinian street were drawn up yesterday as Fatah and Hamas won victories in municipal elections seen as a dress rehearsal for parliamentary polls in the summer.

The ruling Fatah faction of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, secured 56 per cent of the votes, against 33 per cent for Hamas, in unofficial results across 84 towns and villages, election officials said.

The Islamist group won in big towns, however, establishing itself as a serious threat to Fatah not only in Gaza, with victories in Rafah and Beit Lahia, but by sweeping the board in the West Bank town of Qalqilya, where preliminary results showed that it won all 15 council seats.

In Bethlehem, Hamas won six out of seven council seats reserved for Muslims, officials said. Christians retain control, with eight seats. Fatah fared better elsewhere, taking all 15 seats in the West Bank town of Salfit. Final results are not expected until Sunday.

The very fact that Hamas is participating in elections is a bonus for Mr Abbas’s strategy to wean the gunmen off violence by co-opting them into the political process, instead of risking civil war by confronting and disarming them, as Israel demands. It is a high-risk gambit that could mean that Fatah is undermined or in many places replaced altogether by the hardline Islamists.

Both sides immediately claimed victory. Election officials said that Fatah appeared to have won control of 52 of the 84 councils contested, to 24 for Hamas. Mahmoud Zahar, Hamas’s senior leader in Gaza, insisted that his organisation had won 34 councils, saying that many of his group had stood as independents because they were nervous of being identified as Hamas by Israeli troops.

“These results confirm the real trend among the Palestinian populace towards Islam as a programme of reform and resistance,” Dr Zahar said.

The possibility that Hamas will win seats — and Cabinet positions — in parliamentary elections in July also confronts Western diplomats with a problem, putting them under pressure to begin political dealings with a group hitherto regarded as terrorists.

Even Fatah officials conceded yesterday that Hamas was now a force to be reckoned with. Abdullah al-Ifranji, a senior Fatah official in Gaza, said: “We are proud of this democratic experience and we are proud of Fatah that we executed this process,” he said.

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