The Times of Israel reports: Fatah, the ruling party of Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, on Wednesday bested its political rival Hamas in West Bank student university elections for the second time this month.

Fatah’s Shabiba party took 19 seats in elections at the Polytechnic University in Hebron, while Hamas’s Islamic bloc party won 11 seats, and a left-wing group got just one seat. Last year at the Polytechnic, Fatah won 18 seats, while Hamas took 12. Polytechnic is a small university, with just 5,381 students, out of which 3,014 voted.

Student elections are seen by analysts as a barometer of the Palestinian public in the absence of any elections that have included Hamas since 2006.

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