How clans are organizing to fill Gaza’s leadership void
The first meeting of the National Gathering of Palestinian Tribes, Clans, and Families, 16 May 2026
Mohamed Solaimane reports in +973 on 26 May 2026:
In the shade of a building in the Gaza Strip’s southern coastal plain of Al-Mawasi, hands quietly rise in approval. A legal adviser moves methodically through a list, collecting signatures from those gathered.
The atmosphere, around noon one day in early May, is deliberate and formal. It looks, in many ways, like any other organizational election. Except this is not a trade union or a municipal council. It is a family. Some 160 men, representing the Murtaja branch of the Al-Astal family — one of the besieged enclave’s largest and most prominent clans — have just elected eight candidates to their general assembly by acclamation.
These internal elections, once informal and irregular, are now taking place across Gaza at a scale residents and analysts describe as unprecedented. Families that once relied on a single mukhtar — a community leader who is nominated rather than elected — are restructuring into tiered representative bodies, with general assemblies, elected family councils, and formal charters governing how decisions are made and who gets to make them.
But these elections are not confined to Gaza’s largest clans, explained Faten Harb, a feminist activist, community mediator, and mukhtara who was recently elected to the Deir Al-Balah municipal council. Through her work, she has witnessed the spread of such elections across the Strip.