Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, who on Thursday said he did not want to stand for a new term in January elections, is a moderate whose repeated concessions to Israel have cost him popularity and frustrated even some of his own aides.

The head of the Palestinian Authority has seen his writ confined to the Israeli-occupied West Bank since the Islamist Hamas movement seized Gaza in 2007, and in recent months has walked an ever more difficult tightrope between domestic public opinion and a hardline Israeli government.

The failure of Washington to deliver on its calls for a complete freeze on all Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank, including annexed Arab east Jerusalem, was the last straw, according to aides.

Now 74, Abbas has staked his whole political reputation on the strategy of a negotiated settlement with Israel under US auspices as the only realistic path to Palestinian statehood.

When he took over as Palestinian leader in 2005, he publicly condemned the militarisation of the Palestinian uprising or intifada that had gone on under his iconic predecessor Yasser Arafat.

He soon ordered a crackdown on armed resistance to Israel in both the West Bank and Gaza, in accordance with the terms of the internationally adopted 2003 roadmap plan for Middle East peace.

The actions of the security forces under his command led to a marked fall in anti-Israeli violence and the return of law and order across the West Bank, including some former militant bastions.

But the sometimes strong-arm tactics used by his commanders were to leave a history of bad blood between Fatah and Hamas that was to come back to haunt his presidency.

In 2006, the Islamists delivered a heavy blow to Abbas, trouncing Fatah in parliamentary elections on a platform of fighting widespread corruption.

Hamas immediately set about demanding a share of control of the security forces, setting the two parties on a collision course.

After several rounds of skirmishes and an abortive national unity government, Abbas's forces lost control of the Gaza Strip to the Islamists in a week of deadly street fighting in June 2007.

That November, Abbas joined then US president George W. Bush and then Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert in the United States for the relaunch of peace negotiations with the stated goal of a final settlement within a year.

However in December last year his Israeli negotiating partners launched a devasting assault on Gaza in a bid to halt Palestinian rocket attacks that left him no choice but to suspend the talks or lose all domestic credibility.

When elections earlier this year brought hardliner Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to power, Abbas laid down his demand for a settlement freeze as a precondition for any return to talks.

The new US administration of president Barack Obama initially supported his call for a complete freeze, but this week Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared to back down by praising Netanyahu's limited proposals, prompting Abbas's announcement that he would not seek a new term as president.

Abbas was born on March 26, 1935 in British mandate Palestine, in Safed, a centuries-old centre of Jewish learning that is today part of Israel.

With the founding of the Jewish state in 1948 Abbas fled into exile along with some 700,000 Palestinians, and in the late 1950s he and Arafat co-founded Fatah.

In 1974, he was the first senior Palestinian to initiate contact with left-wing Israelis and peace groups. He was the chief Palestinian architect of the 1993 Oslo accords which led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority.

At home, Abbas has an austere style that contrasts starkly with his charismatic predecessor, whose trademark keffiyeh and fiery speeches made him one of the world's most recognisable figures and a global symbol of resistance.

His lack of Arafat's guerrilla credentials has deprived him of some of his predecessor's moral authority over hardline groups like Hamas.