Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah party was ahead in most of the West Bank's main cities after municipal elections that highlighted persistent divisions with its rival Hamas, results showed on Sunday.
Voting took place yesterday only in the occupied West Bank, controlled by Fatah, and not in the Gaza Strip, which is run by the Islamist movement Hamas.
Attempts to hold the first joint elections in the West Bank and Gaza since 2006 failed after the two movements were not able to reach an agreement.
Hamas did not present candidates under its party label in the vote.
Official figures showed turnout at 53.4 per cent, or nearly the same as local elections in the West Bank in 2012, electoral commission chief Hanna Nasser told journalists in Ramallah.
However, turnout was far lower in large cities than in surrounding communities, with the lowest in Nablus, the main city in the northern West Bank, where it was less than 21 percent.