Beirut, Lebanon – The Palestinian Authority (PA) is cracking down on armed groups in the Jenin refugee camp in what experts say is an attempt to restore its limited authority in the occupied West Bank and persuade incoming United States President Donald Trump that it can be a useful security partner.
However, the crackdown has earned it condemnation from many Palestinians, especially after the Saturday night killing of 21-year-old journalist Shatha Sabbagh, who had been reporting from Jenin and whose family said she was killed by PA gunfire.
Since the start of the PA raids, they have been criticised as serving the interests of Israel over supporting the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination.
“Over the past few years, the PA has lost control over the West Bank, and I imagine it is trying to claw back control to prove its worth to its handlers – Israel and the United States,” said Omar Rahman, an expert on Israel-Palestine with the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, a think tank in Doha, Qatar.
“I think it is trying to prove it can play a part that is still relevant, especially at a time when there are voices in the Israeli government trying to force the collapse of the PA,” Rahman told Al Jazeera.
Heavy crackdown
Over the past three years, Israeli raids – both by the army and settlers – have killed and displaced numerous civilians in the West Bank and destroyed homes and livelihoods.
Since the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have stepped up their attacks in the West Bank, killing 729 Palestinians, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
At least 63 were from the Jenin camp.
The PA’s security forces have mirrored some of Israel’s tactics since launching an operation against the camp in early December.
It surrounded the camp with armoured personnel carriers, fired indiscriminately at civilians, summarily detained and abused young men, and cut off water and electricity supplies.
One video circulating online and verified by Sanad, Al Jazeera’s verification agency, shows PA officers stuffing a young man into a rubbish bin and beating him.
“[The Americans] have been training the PA security forces to act as SWAT teams and special forces – not as civil police – to crack down on [Palestinian] armed groups,” said Tahani Mustafa, an expert on Israel-Palestine for the International Crisis Group.
“Whenever you see American involvement in terms of training, this is when you see hardline and coercive tactics deployed against Palestinians,” she told Al Jazeera.
Security cooperation
The PA was ostensibly created to bring about a Palestinian state after the 1993 and 1995 Oslo Accords, which initiated a peace process between then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Under the agreements, the PA’s Western donors – the European Union and US – tasked it with upholding Israel’s security by stamping out armed Palestinian groups across the occupied Palestinian territory, according to Diana Buttu, a Palestinian legal scholar and former adviser and spokesperson for the PA.
In the 1990s, she explained, the PA defended its crackdown on armed groups as necessary to protect the peace process.
However, the peace process in effect has been dead for at least two decades due to Israel’s ongoing confiscation of Palestinian land to build Israeli settlements, she said.
Those settlements are illegal under international law, and since Oslo, the number of settlers has increased from 250,000 to more than 700,000, according to Peace Now, an Israeli nonprofit that tracks illegal settlements.
Since October 7, 2023, Peace Now said, Israel has confiscated more Palestinian land in the West Bank – 23.7sq km (9.15sq miles) – than in the past 20 years combined.
Buttu blames PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, for still sticking to the Oslo process when Israel has so blatantly abandoned it.
“He’s going after the very people who want liberation, not from him, but from Israel,” Buttu told Al Jazeera.
The PA’s security mandate brought it into direct conflict with Hamas, a rival faction that refused to renounce armed struggle against Israel’s occupation after beating Fatah in legislative elections in 2006.
The PA’s Western donors – mainly the US – pressured Fatah to rein in Hamas, exacerbating tensions between the two factions and leading to a brief civil war that began in 2006.
The conflict led to a split in the Palestinian national movement that has still not been bridged despite numerous attempts at reconciliation.
Fatah, under the PA, has since administered two-thirds of the West Bank while Hamas was in control of Gaza.
“The [PA’s] tactic has never been successful. It has never won the hearts and minds of Palestinians,” Buttu said.
Fighting for survival
PA officials reportedly argue that the operation in the Jenin refugee camp is necessary or else Israel will use the presence of fighters there as a pretext to expel more Palestinians from their homes and land in the West Bank, as it has done in Gaza.
However, experts say that Israel is planning to formally annex the West Bank and collapse the PA, irrespective of whether armed resistance continues.
Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, already came close to crushing the Palestinian banking system by refusing to renew a government waiver that allows Israeli banks to interact with Palestinian banks.
The PA does not have its own central bank and is, therefore, reliant on Israel’s banking system to pay salaries and secure vital imports.
Bowing to US pressure, Smotrich renewed the waiver for a year in early December, yet experts fear he won’t do so again during Trump’s presidency, which begins on January 20.
Not doing so would collapse the PA – and West Bank – economically and accelerate the West Bank’s formal annexation, Rahman from the Middle East Council said.
In addition, Rahman warned the ensuing chaos could serve as an Israeli pretext to ethnically cleanse the West Bank, which is why he believes the PA is trying to persuade the incoming Trump administration that it is still a valuable partner in reinforcing Israel’s security.
“You can’t blame the PA for trying to prevent something like that from happening,” Rahman told Al Jazeera. “At the same time, they have no alternative vision.”
Mustafa, from the International Crisis Group, agreed and added that the PA has isolated itself from regional states and its own constituents, making its survival dependent on Israel and its backers.
“Israel is going to annex the West Bank, and we are already seeing that reality – de facto and de jure,” she said. “[Annexation] won’t be grand, but it will be a slow burn.”
“The PA is really counting its days.”
The post Palestinian Authority’s raid on Jenin appeals to Israeli, Western interests appeared first on Al Jazeera.
