Ramallah - (AFP) - An international report warned Wednesday that the battle to succeed 87-year-old Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas could lead to "popular protests, repression and violence, and perhaps the collapse of the Palestinian Authority ."

The publication of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group report came the day after talks that included Abbas and US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who called on the Israeli and Palestinian sides to reduce escalation, on Tuesday in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank.

There is speculation in the Palestinian street about the identity of the successor to Abbas, who headed the Palestinian Authority in 2005 for a term that was supposed to end in 2009.

The report considered that holding "elections according to legal grounds" is considered the best scenario, but this possibility remains "the least likely."

After the death of Yasser Arafat in late 2004, Abbas headed the Fatah movement and the Palestine Liberation Organization, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and was elected in January 2005 as president of the Palestinian Authority.

The report indicated that Abbas "has emptied the Palestinian institutions and mechanisms of their duties while they are empowered to decide on who will succeed him," so it became "unclear who will succeed him and in what way that will be done."

The Palestinians have not gone to the polls since 2005, that is, since Abbas assumed power.

And after he announced the organization of presidential and legislative elections in 2021, Abbas reversed this decision, justifying that by Israel's refusal to allow them to be held in East Jerusalem, which it has occupied since 1967 and which the Palestinians consider the capital of their future state.

Analysts attributed Abbas's move to his fear of a decline in the popularity of the Fatah movement he leads, which leads the Hamas movement that rules the Gaza Strip.

Tension has been hanging over the relationship between the two movements since 2007, after bloody clashes, as a result of which Hamas took military control of the Gaza Strip and expelled Fatah from it.

All attempts at reconciliation between the two movements over the past years have failed.

The report mentioned the names of two Palestinian officials who are possible candidates to succeed Abbas, namely, the Minister of Civil Affairs, the Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hussein al-Sheikh, and the head of the Palestinian Intelligence Service, Majed Faraj.

Although the two men enjoy great weight in the Palestinian Authority and their ability to work with the international community, the report indicates that they do not enjoy enough popularity among the Palestinians.

The report also mentioned both the President of the Palestinian Football Association, Jibril Rajoub, and the former head of the Preventive Security Service, Muhammad Dahlan, who moved to reside in the Emirates since his dispute with Abbas, and the Prime Minister, Muhammad Shtayyeh.

The report considered that "each of these individuals has a special network of relationships," and yet it found that none of them "could work alone."