Palestinians Elect Leader, Unopposed, as Party Chief

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, will retain control of his Fatah party after an election on Saturday in which he ran unopposed.

More than 2,000 delegates, a nearly unanimous majority, voted for him in a show of hands at a party conference in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Fatah’s first such gathering in 20 years. Mr. Abbas succeeded Yasir Arafat as the leader of Fatah, a mainstream nationalist movement, after Mr. Arafat, the Palestinian leader who founded it, died in 2004.

Elections for Fatah’s main governing bodies, the Central Committee and the Revolutionary Council, were expected to take place in the coming days.

Only 65 delegates opposed the motion to elect Mr. Abbas as the party’s leader, according to the Bethlehem-based Palestinian news agency Maan.

Mr. Abbas has won staunch international backing as the leader of the Palestinian Authority. In a victory speech on Saturday, he said he wanted to tell the world that Fatah “adheres to the national project” and to “true positions” and that it would continue to work for an independent Palestinian state.

In a sweeping two-hour speech at the opening of the conference on Tuesday, Mr. Abbas charted Fatah’s course from its early years of armed struggle in the 1960s, which he called a “necessity,” to its current efforts to forge peace deals with Israel. The challenge, he said, is how to turn the limited autonomy the Palestinians have into a “normal state.”

He urged the Palestinians to hold fast and be patient “as long as there is a glimmer of hope” of negotiating a settlement.

Saeb Erekat, a senior Abbas aide who is a veteran Palestinian negotiator, said most of the delegates remained in favor of a two-state solution with Israel despite criticism over the way negotiations have been handled. Specifically, he said there was major criticism that negotiations continued while Israeli settlement activity progressed.

Delegates at the conference have been pushing Fatah leaders to take tougher positions against Israel, participants said, rejecting the idea of negotiations for their own sake and insisting on reserving the option of some kind of resistance should peace talks fail.