Abbas Government
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Palestinian Authority Government of April 2003 was a government of the Palestinian National Authority (PA) from 30 April to 7 October 2003. It was headed by Mahmoud Abbas, the first PA Prime Minister, until 6 September 2003. The Prime Minister and his government were approved by the Palestinian Legislative Council on 29 April and were sworn in on 30 April.
Abbas resigned as Prime Minister on 6 September 2003 because of a struggle for power with President Yasser Arafat and the stagnated implementation of the road map for peace.
After the discharge of the Government in September 2003, Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council Ahmed Qurei was asked to become Prime Minister of an emergency government, but Arafat, on 5 October, appointed Qurei PM of a small emergency cabinet before a government could be presented to Parliament. Qurei and his cabinet were sworn in on 7 October 2003.
History
Formerly, the government was chosen and appointed by PA President Arafat, and Arafat also presided the "Council of Ministers". Under strong pressure of the international community and Israel, Arafat, held hostage in his largely destroyed headquarters in Ramallah besieged by the Israeli army since September 2002, changed the political system. On 18 March 2003, he signed the 2003 Amended Basic Law, which transformed the political system into a semi-presidential one. The Prime Minister became responsible for the composition of the Cabinet and became the Chairman of the "Council of Ministers".
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q22947429. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2003 and 2002.
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This entry incorporates text from “Abbas Government” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.