GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip ? The Palestinian Authority’s new president couldn’t be more different from Yasser Arafat, having little name recognition and no more political clout than a “small fish,” as one prominent Palestinian journalist described him.

Even Rauhi Fattouh’s younger brother said he hoped the 55-year-old would leave his new post after general elections early next year.

But friends of Fattouh advise against too quickly dismissing a man who rose from a refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip to become speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council last spring. That position automatically propelled him to the presidency Thursday, hours after his predecessor died in a Paris hospital.

Fattouh is part of a younger generation that many Palestinians would like to see take political control. He’s an Arafat critic who opposed the 1993 Oslo Accords, which established the Palestinian Authority.

But he doesn’t belong to any of the powerful committees within the Palestine Liberation Organization whose backing he would need to be effective. Those committees debated behind closed doors in recent days about whether to bypass the law and Fattouh and appoint a successor instead.

“We’ll see if he likes the idea of wielding authority, particularly vis a vis Abu Ala (Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia), who is technically subordinate to him,” senior Israeli political analyst Yossi Alpher said. “Everything I’ve heard about him is that he has no such ambitions and no such ability. But we’ll have to wait and see.”

Fattouh was born in the Rafah refugee camp. He’s the oldest of 11 children, born to parents who fled the former Arab town of Borka, near what’s now the Israeli port city of Ashdod, during the 1948 war. They were uprooted again after the 1967 war and moved to Jordan and later Saudi Arabia, said Taysser Fattouh, his younger brother.

Rauhi Fattouh went to college in Syria, where he became active in Palestinian political and student affairs. His activities with Arafat’s Fatah political organization landed him in a Syrian jail for a year, recalled longtime friend Abu Ali Shaheen, a former Palestinian minister and Fatah Revolutionary Council leader. In the 1980s, Fattouh joined Arafat in exile in Tunisia.

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Fattouh returned to Gaza after the signing of the Oslo Accords, which he opposed because they didn’t go far enough to ensure Palestinian rights, Shaheen said. Opposing the peace agreement sidelined Fattouh’s career, and he moved from one nominal post to another until he was elected to the legislative council in 1996. Last year, he joined Arafat’s Cabinet as agriculture minister.

When Qureia became prime minister earlier this year, Fattouh took his place as the legislature’s speaker. Some analysts say Fattouh was elected to that post to appease Gazans who thought there were too many West Bank Palestinians at the top of the political hierarchy.

But Shaheen said Fattouh did more in his brief tenure to hold Arafat’s feet to the fire over widespread corruption within the Palestinian Authority than his predecessors did.