Abbas set for victory

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Palestinians began voting on Sunday to elect a successor to their historic leader Yasser Arafat with his longtime deputy Mahmud Abbas widely expected to romp home to victory. Polling booths opened across the West Bank and Gaza Strip at 07:00 while residents of occupied east Jerusalem would also be able to cast their ballots at post offices in the holy city from 08:00. A total of 1.8 million Palestinians are entitled to vote under the eye of hundreds of foreign observers.

Preliminary results are expected shortly after polls close 12 hours later although a final announcement is not scheduled until Monday morning. Israel has promised to keep a low profile until Monday night, keeping its troops out of main Palestinian population centres and lifting restrictions at roadblocks to allow voters easy access to the polling booths.

Polls have shown Abbas with a lead of at least 30 points over his nearest rival, the independent democracy activist Mustafa Barghuti, who has been the surprise package of the election with a lively campaign which has seen him arrested twice by the Israeli authorities while in east Jerusalem.

http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_1644769,00.html


Pre-election polls indicated Abbas would win the presidential election by a landslide after a crowd-pleasing campaign in which he pledged to uphold the iconic Arafat's struggle for statehood in Israeli-occupied territories, but by non-violent means. Israel, which branded Arafat an "arch-terrorist" and shunned him, has sized up Abbas as a man they could deal with, and US-led mediators have embraced him as a potential peacemaker.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/DCE5FB03-5DC1-4F50-B5B3-BEE7B1BE1D31.htm