RAMALLAH, West Bank - Palestinian Authority president Mahmud Abbas said on Thursday he will not seek re-election in January amid frustration with the US position on illegal Israeli settlements, a senior PLO official said.
"President Abbas told the PLO executive committee that he will not run in the next presidential election, and the executive committee unanimously told him that they reject the decision," said Yasser Abed Rabbo.
The Palestine Liberation Organisation's top body "announced they will still support him as the nominee in the elections," which Abbas has called for January 24 alongside a parliamentary poll.
"President Abbas has said more than once that he does not want to be a candidate because of his feelings of great frustration about the American position on the peace process," senior Fatah official Nabil Shaath said.
He said Abbas's frustration also applied to the international community, "Arab and non-Arab," because of lack of progress on the Palestinians' demand for a halt to illegal Jewish settlement building on the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank.
"But the Fatah movement with all of its cadres and institutions stands behind president Abbas running for another term," Shaath told reporters.
Abbas's frustration was said to have peaked when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised an Israeli proposal for some settlement limits as "unprecedented" after months of Washington demanding a full settlement freeze.
Clinton later clarified that US President Barack Obama's administration still considers settlements "illegitimate" but also called on the two sides to resume negotiations even without the freeze demanded by the Palestinians.
All Jewish settlements are illegal under international law because they are built on Arab land (mainly Palestinian), illegally occupied by Israel since 1967.
Around illegal 200,000 Jewish settlers are estimated to have moved into the dozen or so Israeli settlements in Palestinian East Jerusalem.
There are about 300,000 more illegal Jewish settlers currently living in settlements the Palestinian West Bank.
Shaath said Abbas felt he had done everything required of him under the internationally-adopted 2003 roadmap agreement, which called on the Palestinians to improve security, but had received nothing in return.
"The Americans have abandoned their obligations," Shaath said.
Abbas was elected president in 2005 following the death of the iconic Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Democratically elected Hamas movement, which drove Abbas's forces from the Gaza Strip in June 2007, no longer recognises him as president because his term officially ended in January 2009.
Last month, Abbas called for presidential and parliamentary elections to be held on January 24, a date set by the Palestinian constitution, but Hamas has rejected the elections as "unconstitutional" because of Abbas's status.
Abbas had given into Israeli pressure not to deal positively with democratically elected Hamas.
The two groups have feuded since Hamas routed Fatah forces in Gaza two years ago to prevent a US-backed coup against Hamas’s democratic election.
Israel, which wants to crush any Palestinian liberation movement, responded to Hamas's win in the elections with sanctions, and almost completely blockaded the impoverished coastal strip after Hamas seized power in 2007, although a ‘lighter’ siege had already existed before.
Gaza is still considered under Israeli occupation as Israel controls air, sea and land access to the Strip.
The Rafah crossing with Egypt, Gaza's sole border crossing that bypasses Israel, rarely opens as Egypt is under immense US and Israeli pressure to keep the crossing shut.
Fatah has little administrative say in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and has no power in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, both of which are Palestinian territories illegally occupied by Israel in 1967.
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