The six-month cease-fire agreement, which runs out next week, almost collapsed at the beginning of November when Israel renewed military operations in the Gaza Strip in response to Palestinian militant activity, prompting an increase in rocket strikes against Israel.
According to the poll, run by the independent Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 74% of Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip and West Bank are for maintaining the ceasefire agreement, and 23% are against it. The survey, in which 1,270 Palestinians took part, had a margin of error of three percentage points.
The poll also suggested that the majority of Palestinians want to hold elections for a new leader in January and are against automatically extending the term of the current Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.
Under an Egyptian proposal supported by Abbas's Fatah group, the president would remain in office until January 2010 in order to synchronize presidential and parliamentary election cycles. The radical Hamas movement, which controls Gaza after ousting the internationally recognized Fatah government and has the most seats in parliament, believes the president should step down at the end of his term on January 9.
Sixty-four percent of the polled agree with the Hamas position and would like to keep to the scheduled presidential vote, which the survey suggested Abbas would win.
Although he has lost popularity, 48% of those polled said they would vote for Abbas if elections were held today, 10 percentage points more than would go for the Hamas movement's leader, Ismail Hani. Three months ago there was a 14-point gap between the two.
In defining the social-economic situation in the area, 88% said that it was bad or very bad, with 40% of the respondents wanting to emigrate from Gaza.
