Almost two months after former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA) Salam Fayyad resigned, ending the strained relationship that characterized his tenure in the West Bank government, President Mahmoud Abbas appointed Rami Hamdallah, the 58-year-old dean of An-Najah University in Nablus, as the new prime minister.

Hamdallah, who also served as the director of the Central Elections Commission, formed a new government on Thursday [June 6], in which the majority of the ministers remained in their positions with minor reshuffling. Three new ministers were sworn in to head the ministries of finance, social affairs, and education and higher education, in addition to two deputy premiers.

News of the appointment of the British-educated Hamdallah, who obtained a doctorate in applied linguistics from the University of Lancaster and has been An-Najah’s dean since 1998, was largely met with indifference on the Palestinian street. Abbas — whose presidential mandate legitimately expired in 2009 — has chosen Hamdallah without elections in the same manner that Fayyad was cherry-picked immediately following the bloody division with Hamas in 2007, in which hundreds of Palestinians from both sides were killed in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In a phone interview on June 4, Mohammad Jaradat, a Ramallah-based journalist, told Al-Monitor that he believes that Hamdallah will be nothing more than a puppet in Abbas’ hands.