Research & Investigations
Seven prime ministers carried Palestine's government from Arafat to Abbas
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The Palestinian prime ministership was born of a power struggle. In March 2003, under American and European pressure to dilute Yasser Arafat's authority, the Basic Law was amended to create the post — and every man who has held it since has worked in the space between a strong presidency and a state that does not yet exist.
Seven men have carried the office in twenty-three years. Their records — what Palestinians credited them with, and what Palestinians held against them — form a history of the Palestinian Authority itself.
The office and its holders, from the post's creation in 2003 to the present government. Graphic: Times of Palestine.
Mahmoud Abbas, March–September 2003#
The first prime minister was the man who now embodies the presidency the post was built to check. Abbas — Abu Mazen, Oslo's co-architect — took office promising reform and an end to the armed chaos of the second intifada, and won early respect abroad for saying plainly that the intifada's militarization had hurt the national cause.
At home the appointment carried a taint he never shook: the post was widely seen as made in Washington, and his struggle with Arafat over control of the security services consumed the government. He resigned after four months, blaming both Arafat's court and the lack of Israeli and American follow-through — an early lesson in the office's structural weakness.
Ahmed Qurei, 2003–2006#
Abu Ala, another Oslo architect and long-time speaker of parliament, was the fixer who kept the machine running through the hardest transition the Authority has faced: Arafat's final siege at the Muqata'a, his death in November 2004, and the handover to an elected President Abbas. Palestinians credited him with steadiness when the ship could have gone down.
The account against him was written by a parliamentary inquiry: the cement affair, in which Egyptian cement imported through companies linked to his family's circle was resold into Israeli construction — including, reports charged, the separation wall itself. He denied wrongdoing, but the word "cement" attached itself to his name in the public mind, and to the old guard's reputation with it.
Ismail Haniyeh, 2006–2007#
The only prime minister Palestinians elected into the office. Hamas's landslide in the January 2006 legislative elections made Haniyeh — a refugee-camp son of Shati, austere in style and fluent in the street's language — premier of a government the West refused to fund. Admirers saw in him the dignity of a leader who lived like his voters and an electoral mandate no successor has matched.
His government's season ended in the Authority's deepest wound. The donor boycott starved public salaries; the Mecca unity government of early 2007 collapsed within months; and in June 2007 the movement he belonged to took Gaza by force, after which Abbas dismissed him.
Haniyeh governed Gaza for years more, rose to lead Hamas's political bureau, and was assassinated by Israel in Tehran in July 2024. His premiership remains the argument Palestinians still have with each other: a democratic mandate, and a national schism, in the same chapter.
Salam Fayyad, 2007–2013#
The technocrat. A US-trained economist from the IMF, Fayyad was appointed over the ruins of the split and built the Authority's most praised governing record: salaries paid on time, institutions audited, security restored to West Bank streets, and a two-year state-building plan that by 2011 had the World Bank, IMF and UN certifying Palestinian institutions ready for statehood. Donors trusted him with billions because the books balanced.
Palestinians never elected him, and never let him forget it. Fatah resented an outsider in its government; critics called his program "statehood without sovereignty" that made occupation cheaper to run; and the security discipline he prized bordered, for his detractors, on policing dissent. When austerity bit in September 2012, the streets that had been quiet for five years filled against him. He resigned the next spring.
Rami Hamdallah, 2013–2019#
The university president. An-Najah's long-serving head brought no faction and no ambition, which was precisely his qualification. Palestinians credited him with six years of low-drama administration, two honest attempts at reconciliation governments — including the 2014 national-consensus cabinet Gaza briefly accepted — and a professor's patience with an impossible brief.
The ledger against him was about what the office had become: power lived in the presidency, and Hamdallah administered rather than governed. The Gaza measures of 2017 — salary cuts and the electricity squeeze applied to pressure Hamas — landed on ordinary Gazans and are held against the government he led.
A bomb struck his convoy in Gaza in March 2018; he survived, but the reconciliation he was sent to embody did not.
Mohammad Shtayyeh, 2019–2024#
The economist of Fatah's inner circle. Shtayyeh spoke the language of development banks and the language of the movement at once, and his government won credit for its early COVID response — decisive lockdowns that for a season made the Authority look like a state protecting its people — and for keeping wages moving through repeated Israeli seizures of clearance revenues.
Two wounds defined the case against him. PA security men beat the dissident Nizar Banat to death in June 2021, and the protests that followed were met with force — the government's darkest hour in public memory, whatever the formal chains of command. And the fiscal siege ground down teachers and civil servants into strike after strike. He resigned in February 2024, saying Gaza's catastrophe demanded new arrangements.
Mohammad Mustafa, 2024–#
The incumbent. A World Bank veteran and chairman of the Palestine Investment Fund, Mustafa was Abbas's choice to carry a reform program credible enough to reopen donor purses and to build an administrative committee for Gaza's day-after. He has carried both to every capital that will listen, and technocrats credit the seriousness of the paperwork.
The criticism is the oldest one in the office's file: he was appointed, not agreed — the factions were not consulted, Hamas rejected the government outright, and no parliament has sat to confirm anyone since 2007. His premiership is still being written, against the hardest backdrop any of the seven has faced.
What the office teaches#
Across seven holders, the pattern holds.
Prime ministers rise as correctives — to Arafat's centralism, to the split, to donor distrust — and are worn down by the same three stones: a presidency that keeps the real keys, an occupation that controls the money and the movement, and a divided house that has not voted since 2006.
Palestinians have liked their premiers best when they delivered ordinary government — salaries, order, honest books — and judged them hardest when the office was used to manage Palestinians instead of representing them.
The office was invented to share power. Twenty-three years on, its history is the record of how rarely power was shared — and of the seven men who tried to govern anyway.
