The Palestinian president has said that he plans to stay in office until the next election and will be ready to hold the vote as soon as consensus is reached with rival faction Hamas.
Repeating that he will not run for re-election, Mahmoud Abbas appeared to dispel fears of a vacuum once the terms for the current legislature and his presidency expire on January 25.
"At any time we have the election I will go away and will not run," he said on Wednesday when asked if he would stay on until a vote is held.
"If there will be any consensus between us and Hamas after one month or two months, we are ready ... to conduct the elections immediately," Abbas told reporters in the Chilean capital, Santiago, part of a Latin America tour to muster support against Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land.
Abbas confirmed last week that elections scheduled for January 24 would be postponed and said on Wednesday that Palestinian authorities were planning for the polls.
The Central Election Commission this month announced it had advised Abbas to put off the election because Hamas, which has de facto control of the Gaza Strip where some 1.5 million Palestinians live, had warned it would not allow them to vote.
Factional rivalry
The rivalry between Hamas and Fatah came to a head in June 2007 when Hamas routed forces loyal to Abbas's Fatah faction and seized control of Gaza after 18 months together in an uneasy coalition.
Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007 after routing forces loyal to Abbas's Fatah faction, and disputes Abbas's legitimacy in representing the Palestinian people.
The two groups have been engaged in long-running reconciliation negotiations brokered by Egypt, and were due to sign a unity deal last month that would have called for Palestinian presidential and parliamentary elections to be held on June 28.
But the agreement stalled after Abbas was seen to have smothered a UN report on Israel's Gaza war conduct that could have led to international prosecutions for war crimes.
Hamas said Abbas's "absurd and criminal" move to delay endorsing the report "betrayed" the Palestinian victims of the Israeli offensive in Gaza and "placed a heavy" obstacle in the way of unity.