Middle East
Palestinian Authority, seeking Gaza role, takes on West Bank militants
By
The Washington Post December 22, 2024
Miriam Berger, Heidi Levine and Sufian Taha
The Washington Post December 22, 2024
Palestinians react during clashes between Palestinian Authority security forces and the militants who control the Jenin refugee camp Monday in the Occupied West Bank. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)
JENIN, West Bank — The black-clad militants of Jenin refugee camp raced through sewage-filled alleyways to dodge gunfire echoing all around. “Quickly,” a Palestinian fighter urged as they weaved through a network of armed patrols and improvised barricades. “Watch out,” another warned at a juncture where an improvised explosive was being set.
The action witnessed by Washington Post reporters on Monday could have been the response to an Israeli military raid on this northern West Bank city, the epicenter of a new generation of Palestinian militancy.
But for the past two weeks, the militants of Jenin have been locked in a rare, open battle with an internal foe: the Palestinian Authority.
In Jenin, the authority, which is backed by the West, has launched its largest and most heavily armed operation in its three decades to thwart a growing West Bank insurgency against the Palestinian leadership and Israeli occupation. It’s trying to prove it can manage security in the limited areas of the West Bank it controls as it seeks to also govern a postwar Gaza Strip.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ruled out the authority’s return to Gaza. Key figures in his far-right coalition have pushed to annex part or all of the Palestinian territories. But in the latest round of ceasefire negotiations, Israel has agreed to let the authority take over administration of the Rafah border between Gaza and Egypt for a short period, according to a former Egyptian official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.
The authority launched Operation Protect the Homeland this month to retake control of Jenin camp by targeting “outlaws” and those “spreading chaos and anarchy and harming civil peace,” security forces spokesman Anwar Rajab told The Post. “All these actions and policies undermine the work of the PA, and these groups give Israel an excuse to implement its plans in the West Bank.”
The operation’s “achievements” have included arresting more than two dozen wanted militants, wounding others, dismantling dozens of explosives and “advancing on important axes” into the refugee camp, Rajab said. Security forces have killed three people: a fighter, a 19-year-old passerby on a motorcycle and a 14-year-old boy. On Sunday, WAFA, the official Palestinian news agency, reported the first death of a member of the PA security forces, Saher Farouk Jumah of the presidential guard .
Both sides appear to be showing relative restraint. Israel’s days-long raid in Jenin in September killed at least 21 people, according to the authority’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between fighters and civilians. The Israel Defense Forces said it killed 14 militants.
The authority also clashes periodically with militants; security forces have killed 13 Palestinians, including eight in Jenin, since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, according to local reports.
“We don’t want to see a single drop of blood being shed,” Sabri Saidam, a member of Fatah’s central committee, told The Post. “What we would like to achieve is a state of calm, to sit down with different factions and agree on the way forward.”
Abbas has decided that the PA “will impose its authority and there is no turning back,” said a Palestinian official close to the president who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private discussions.
But two weeks into the crackdown, militants still roam freely in the Jenin camp. Gunfire rings out day and night. The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees has suspended schools. Businesses are shut. In the Damaj and Hawashin neighborhoods, heavily damaged in the Israeli raid in September, some families have been without electricity and water for days.
Masked authority security forces patrol the Jenin governmental hospital at the camp’s edge and snipers are positioned on the roof to prevent militants from entering to hide, according to a hospital official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.
Post reporters heard what sounded like gunfire coming from the roof. Bullets have hit the emergency entrance and pierced an office window, he said, and patients and staff are too afraid to come.
Anger at the security forces in the West Bank is already high. Hemmed in by the Israeli occupation, they operate in ever-shrinking territory and, under security agreements, may not intervene to stop Israeli settler violence or deadly military raids. Many Palestinians see the forces as Israel’s subcontractors and Abbas’s tool for corruption and suppressing internal dissent.
“The people want ‘law and order’, but apply the law right and people will stand with you,” said Arwad, 35, who spoke on the condition his last name be withheld out of concern for reprisal from Palestinian and Israeli authorities. “When the Israeli soldiers and jeeps come here, where is the law?”
Arwad’s brother and father are in an Israeli jail, he said, and other relatives have been killed fighting Israeli forces. Even if the authority arrests wanted militants, he said, “the resistance will continue. Twenty-four hours later there will be someone new in their place.”
Authority vehicles block the camp entrance. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)
Anger against the Palestinian Authority is growing
The security forces are among the last threads holding together the Oslo accords, signed in the 1990s to create a Palestinian state out of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. In the decades since, Israel has expanded and entrenched its control of the West Bank, eroding the authority’s jurisdiction.
The last time Palestinian factions faced off in the streets was 2007, when Hamas, Fatah’s Islamist rival, ousted the authority in Gaza and set up its own government. Since then, the United States and the European Union have invested heavily in reforming and training the Palestinian security forces. Former militants were offered positions in the security forces if they turned in their guns.
Nonetheless, the security forces remain chronically underfunded and ill-equipped to take on the responsibilities that Washington envisions for the West Bank and postwar Gaza Strip.
New militant groups attracting poor and politically disaffected men have cropped up in West Bank cities and refugee camps in recent years. They fight back against Israeli raids and attack Israeli soldiers and civilians. Some have ties to Iran-backed Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad.
Israel’s war on Hamas, launched after the militant group killed more than 1,200 on Oct. 7, 2023, has devastated Hamas’s fighting and governing force. Israeli attacks in Gaza have killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, according to the health ministry there.
In Gaza, public anger is growing against Hamas, too. But its popularity in the West Bank, where people are fed up with Abbas and the occupation, has risen.
The Jenin operation, Rajab said, was aimed at suspects wanted for criminal charges, including shooting at hospitals and preparing explosive devices. But it escalated after the PA seized some of the brigade’s money. Militants seized two security forces vehicles and paraded them through the camp. Later, a car bomb exploded near a police station.
Community leaders, including fathers of Jenin fighters killed by Israeli forces, tried to mediate a truce between the fighters and the security forces, according to Firas Abu al-Wafa, the secretary general of Fatah Jenin, but the authority refused to compromise.
Saidam said talks continue and “the security apparatus is adamant to impose law and order.”
Wafa called Jenin “the start and the finish.”
“If the situation in Jenin stabilizes, then the whole West Bank will be stable,” he said. But if it doesn’t, “there will not be stability across the West Bank.”
Authority security personnel take up positions to prevent protesters from entering the camp. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)
Shedding blood
For a few hours on Tuesday, the guns in Jenin fell silent.
Shortly before 2 p.m., the PA and Jenin Brigade agreed to a pause in fighting. Authorities released the bodies of the militant Yazid Ja’aysa and 14-year-old Mohammed Amer, both killed on Dec. 14. Men carried the bodies of Ja’aysa, shrouded in the flag of Islamic Jihad, and Amer, in the Palestinian flag, to a cemetery adorned with oversize portraits of fighters, most of them killed in clashes with Israeli forces.
As the sun set, gunmen emerged from the alleys to resume positions.
Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine called on the authority Saturday “to immediately halt the security campaign in Jenin, which serves only the Israeli enemy.”
Tahani Mustafa, a Palestine analyst with the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, said the operation “will definitely delegitimize the PA and its grassroots Fatah” base, but the authority’s existence isn’t threatened, because it relies on the West, not its people, for funding.
Jenin is unique, she said, because there are no illegal Jewish settlements in the immediate vicinity. Elsewhere, she said, “you have pockets of Palestinian populations but no place to physically mobilize [the security forces] in mass clusters. …
“It is very unlikely Israel will allow this to escalate.”
The militants racing through the camp Monday were headed toward a standoff with security forces.
Two security forces vehicles stood at one end of a road. They fired sound bombs in warning. Then they switched to live fire. An Israeli drone hummed above.
Militants and camp residents gathered at the other end. Women, many dressed conservatively in black, and cheering children waved Palestinian flags. They wore face masks. The sting of tear gas lingered.
“We hope that the security forces leave the camp, because it’s forbidden to shed blood,” said Kifah Al Amouri. Both her children were fighters, she said; one was killed by Israel soldiers.
The militants, she said, were “defending their country.”