His formulaic response underscored the Palestinian Authority’s weakened position and sclerotic leadership as Hamas, its longtime archrival that rules the Gaza Strip, carried out the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel’s history and threatened to drag the region into a prolonged conflict. (NASA/Wikimedia Commons)
JERUSALEM — As Hamas militants rampaged through Israel on Saturday and Israeli strikes rained down on Gaza, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was at his base in Ramallah. He made calls, held meetings and issued statements.
Palestinians have a right “to defend themselves against the terrorism of settlers and occupation forces,” he said after a discussion with security officials.
His formulaic response underscored the Palestinian Authority’s weakened position and sclerotic leadership as Hamas, its longtime archrival that rules the Gaza Strip, carried out the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel’s history and threatened to drag the region into a prolonged conflict.
Abbas is backed by the West but is widely unpopular across the Palestinian territories, where people are seething at the Israeli bombardment of Gaza and a year of deadly raids across the West Bank. His autocratic government is viewed by many Palestinians as an extension of the Israeli occupation.
As Gaza prepares for what is expected to be an extensive Israeli ground invasion — and Hamas’s allies in Lebanon and Syria engage in cross-border exchanges — the public absence of Palestinian political leadership is adding to the chaos.
The Palestinian Authority’s “silence reflects a very clear weakness,” said Rula Shadeed, co-director of the Ramallah-based Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy. “And also that their hands are tied. The way that they have been handling the struggle for liberation has not been fruitful in any way.”
“This is very dangerous,” she added. “We don’t know how it will play out.”
Hussein el-Sheikh, an Abbas confidant and the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said Tuesday on X, formerly Twitter, that Palestinian officials “requested that food and medical supplies be entered urgently to our people in the Gaza Strip, but Israel refused.”
At 87 years old, Abbas is in the 18th year of a four-year term as head of the Palestinian Authority, established as an interim government by the 1993 Oslo accords. The agreements gave the Authority partial sovereignty over parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which along with east Jerusalem were meant to be part of a future Palestinian state. Yet the Oslo maps no longer reflect the realities on the ground; the hope of a two-state solution has grown more remote with each passing year.
Israeli settlements and military control over the occupied territories have continued to expand. Hamas, an Islamist movement committed to Israel’s destruction, rejected the peace process from the start.
In 2007, following a disputed election in Gaza, Hamas violently ousted the Authority from the strip. Israel imposed a land and sea blockade on the tiny coastal enclave and fought four wars in Gaza in the intervening years. The fifth, which many fear will be the most deadly, was declared Sunday.
The fighting began Saturday when, under the cover of thousands of rockets fired from Gaza, hundreds of Hamas gunmen broke through Israel’s high-tech border wall and terrorized towns across the south. They killed more than 1,200 people and took more than 100 hostages back to the strip.
Israel has responded with an unrelenting campaign of airstrikes on Gaza, killing more than 1,000 people, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Gazans on Saturday to “leave now,” but most have nowhere to go. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” of the enclave, cutting off access to power and basic supplies.
The heavy civilian toll and the scenes of destruction have ignited anger across the West Bank, where Israel has closed roads and increased checkpoints for Palestinians. Israeli forces have killed 23 Palestinians in the West Bank since Saturday, according to the Health Ministry in Ramallah.
At least 179 Palestinians have been killed across the territory since January, according to the United Nations, making 2023 the deadliest year for West Bank Palestinians in two decades. There has also been a surge in violent attacks by Israeli settlers, urged on by far-right members of Netanyahu’s government.
Israeli and Palestinian Authority security forces have struggled to contain the rise of new militant groups in Palestinian refugee camps. Some have ties to more established armed groups, including Hamas, but most are loosely organized. The majority of the fighters are young and poor. They are fed up with the occupation and disillusioned with their leaders in Ramallah.
“Palestinians were resisting in the West Bank, and they paid a very hard price,” said Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian politician who heads the Palestinian National Initiative. He said Hamas made its move in part “because of what was happening in the West Bank.”
Abbas now finds himself caught in the middle, as he has been for much of his political career — criticized by Israel and the United States for not condemning militant violence, and by Palestinians for his close ties with Washington and the Authority’s security cooperation with Israel.
Events in Gaza are “increasing the political weight of Hamas and decreasing the political weight and influence of the PA,” said Ghassan Khatib, a former Palestinian minister of planning. “Because now is the time for fighting. And the popular parties are the parties involved in the fighting.”
Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to Britain, rejected those claims.
“It’s we who represent the Palestinian people,” he said. Palestinian national institutions, including the Authority, “can never be irrelevant. These are the only national, regional and international representatives of the Palestinian people.”
Abbas’s strategy for Gaza, Zomlot said, was two-pronged: mobilize humanitarian resources for Gaza and push for a diplomatic end to the war.
Zomlot grew up in Gaza’s Rafah refugee camp. He last visited the strip two weeks ago for an uncle’s funeral.
On Monday, an Israeli airstrike killed his cousin, her husband, two of their children, her mother-in-law and two other family members in their home in northern Gaza, he said. His cousin’s 2-year-old twins are in intensive care.
As a militant group, “Hamas is not part of our national institutions,” he said. “They have their own calculations.”
But what happens in Gaza in the weeks ahead will resonate across the West Bank, probably forcing pent-up anger and frustration to the surface.
The Oslo peace accords, Shadeed said, had not only failed but “have been a tool to sustain the status quo of the West Bank, the increase of settlements, the de facto annexation.”
Israel has sought to keep the Palestinian Authority weak, Barghouti said. Now, he said, Palestinian leaders needed to “do everything they can to move in the direction of unifying Palestinians.”
Mkheimer Abusada, one of Gaza’s most respected political analysts, did not have politics on his mind when reached by phone from Gaza City. “Why are you asking about the PA?” he said. “Why aren’t you asking about setting up a humanitarian corridor? There are 2 million people who are trapped by Israel without a safe passage.”
Gazans, he said, were “looking at the PA now to do something, to stop what is happening.” The boom of airstrikes echoed in the background.
