Comment by megous

From your own source:

> In the lead-up to the elections, on 26 September 2005 Israel launched a campaign of arrests against PLC members. 450 members of Hamas were detained, mostly those involved in the 2006 PLC elections. The majority of them were kept in administrative detention for different periods.[19] In the election period, 15 PLC members were captured and held as prisoners.[20]

> On 21 December 2005 Israeli officials stated their intention to prevent voting in East Jerusalem, which, unlike most of the Palestinian-inhabited areas that were planned to participate in the election, was under Israeli civil and military control.

> On the day of the election, the ballot boxes were held in Israeli Post Offices inside Jerusalem. Israeli police officers were present to monitor the proceedings of the election. At the end of the day the Israeli authorities transferred the ballot boxes to the Palestinian Authority.[19]

Question: How is withdrawing from Gaza interfering with the election while these actual examples of interference aren’t?

It seems to me if your narration of history were true (which I’m not sure it is) then withdrawing from Gaza but not the West Bank was merely a dumb move, not interference.

EDIT: To be clear, I don’t believe—as did observers at the time—that these interference efforts had a significant impact on the results. I believe these elections were fair and accurate despite some inference efforts by Israel. Whatever politics Israel conducted before the election was just that, politics. Every participant or stakeholder in election which holds any amount of power over the electorate does these politics before and during elections.