On Jan. 15, hundreds of men attend the joint funeral for the six Palestinians killed in an Israeli attack the night before on Jenin refugee camp in Jenin, West Bank. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)
JENIN, West Bank — The Palestinian Authority recently took a high-stakes gamble in this restive city, launching a major military operation aimed at clipping the wings of militant groups that had grown in influence and audacity.
If the operation succeeded, Palestinian security forces would demonstrate they could maintain order not only in the parts of the West Bank they nominally control but also, if given the chance, perhaps in Gaza as well. The role of the Palestinian Authority in governing Gaza is very much a live question as foreign powers and Arab states now debate the future of the war-torn enclave.
But the six-week campaign in Jenin, which lost momentum after Israeli forces intervened last month, ultimately came up badly short and exposed some of the challenges the authority would face in securing Gaza. While the security forces arrested dozens of Iran-backed fighters, high-profile militants remain at large.
The clashes highlighted how poorly equipped the Palestinian Authority security forces are compared to the groups they are seeking to subdue. The campaign also underlined questions about how far Palestinians would go to fight fellow Palestinians and whether the authority could maintain its popular legitimacy if it did so. Moreover, the events in Jenin revealed how Israel’s actions, which include its own withering attacks on targets in the city, undermine the ability of the Palestinian Authority to exert its control.
The battle between the Palestinian security forces and an umbrella group of fighters in Jenin led by Palestinian Islamic Jihad left 15 dead, including at least six civilians, and dozens injured, a spokesman for the authority’s forces said.
The questions raised about the Palestinian Authority’s ability to rule come as governments in the region are racing by the end of this month to present a counterproposal to President Donald Trump’s proposal to displace all of its 2 million current inhabitants.
While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said there must be no role for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, an alternative Arab plan, expected in the coming weeks, is certain to give the authority a central role, despite profound concerns about its capabilities.
The Jenin operation “demonstrated the limits of the PA security forces,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “If you cannot succeed decisively in an operation like Jenin, how can you hope to tackle the infinitely more complex situation in Gaza?”
Firepower put to the test
The Jenin campaign was the biggest test so far of the Palestinian Authority forces, which are responsible for security control in the West Bank’s major Palestinian population centers under the terms of the peace deal reached with Israel in the 1990s.
The forces include about 35,000 members and coordinate security and share intelligence with Israel, which continues to occupy the West Bank. The U.S. government has given Palestinian security forces about $1.1 billion since 2007, State Department officials said last year, and has supervised their training in Jordan. The Trump administration has stopped all funding to the Palestinian Authority security forces as part of the global freeze on foreign assistance, according to U.S. and Palestinian officials.
At a news conference last month and in an interview last week, Anwar Rajab, spokesman for the security forces, outlined what he said were the accomplishments of the Jenin operation: Hundreds of militants and accomplices arrested. Illicit funds, explosives and weapons seized. Improvised bombs that had been planted in neighborhoods — meant, the militants said, to target Israeli soldiers — were defused.
“The security services have the ability and readiness to deal with the situation in Gaza,” Rajab said in the interview.
But Jenin residents, Israeli officials and analysts have panned the operation.
“If the end result is that everybody in the world — and especially the U.S. and the Arab countries — see that the PA can’t get control of 100 militants in Jenin, how can they secure Gaza?,” said Mairav Zonszein, senior Israel analyst at International Crisis Group.
After laying siege for about six weeks to the Jenin refugee camp, which is adjacent to the city, Palestinian security forces remained unable to penetrate its maze of narrow alleys. When Washington Post journalists visited the camp on two occasions in mid-January, armed militants strolled the streets while scouts with walkie talkies stood watch on rooftops, unbothered by sporadic bursts of gunfire from security forces on the mountain above.
The operation was taxing for the residents of the camp. But compared to raids by the Israeli troops, for the militants, it was “a break, a vacation,” said Jihad, a senior member of the Jenin Battalion, the umbrella group of militants. Like some others interviewed for this story, Jihad gave only his first name out of fear of retribution.
The Jenin Battalion is better armed than the security forces, according to Tahani Mustafa, Crisis Group’s senior Palestine analyst. Many have M-16 rifles smuggled in from Jordan or bought from weapons traffickers in Israel, Jihad said. The authority’s forces, in contrast, carry old Kalashnikov rifles. Israel has barred the Palestinian security forces from importing better weapons, ammunition and light armored vehicles.
In early January, the militants demonstrated their continued capabilities by shooting dead three Israelis driving through al-Funduq, a village outside the city. The Jenin Battalion claimed responsibility. Then, Jihad said, the gunmen slipped undetected back into the camp to take refuge.
The attack “was first a message to the PA, because they are besieging us, but that won’t end our resistance against the occupation,” he said.
Contrary to the authority’s claims, Jihad said that only a handful of those arrested by the middle of last month were members of the battalion and that only one militant fighter had been killed by the security forces. Two other victims were unaffiliated teenagers.
The authority’s forces, meanwhile, lost six members. Many others sustained injuries, a colonel who directs training at the authority’s Central Training Institute for security forces said, speaking on the condition of anonymity according to his office’s protocol.
During a recent assessment of the operation, Palestinian security leaders concluded their forces had fallen short in hitting targets, engaging in close quarters gun battles and dismantling IEDs, the colonel said. “Our men have very basic experience and don’t have protective gear, and the situation for them was very hard,” he added.
Loyalty put to the test
Violence among Palestinian factions is hardly unprecedented. A bloody battle in Gaza in 2007 between Hamas and the Fatah party, which controls the Palestinian Authority, left dozens dead and culminated in the authority’s ouster from the enclave. But for years, the internecine fighting had not reached the level recently seen in Jenin.
The military campaign this winter tested the loyalties of some authority security officers, raising questions about their willingness to turn their guns on other Palestinians. In one widely shared video, an officer from Jenin camp, Mustafa al-Qaniri, publicly resigned in protest. (His son, Ibrahim, whom Hamas claimed as a member, was later killed in an Israeli airstrike.)
Palestinian Authority security personnel once commanded more respect in Palestinian society. It was “a good job with a good salary,” said a woman in Jenin named Alaa, whose husband signed on with the force more than a decade ago. But when he received orders in December to deploy in Jenin, he refused. “If he would fight against his people, how could he look them in the eyes?” asked Alaa.
His family regarded Israelis, and not their fellow Palestinians, as the enemy. “To see someone from the same religion, same nationality, fighting against you? I feel like my heart is really breaking,” said the family matriarch, Umm Hassan.
The authority was already unpopular with many Palestinians, due to concerns over corruption and ineptitude. But according to interviews in Jenin, the operation there made enemies out of skeptics, triggered blowback even among some authority supporters — and underscored how the authority’s legitimacy is at risk when it cracks down on armed elements.
The campaign against the militants touched a nerve among many here who are frustrated with the authority’s inaction in the face of raids by the Israeli military and rising violence by Israeli settlers. Eager to prevent an open war with Israel, the Palestinian Authority avoids confrontation with Israeli forces, so militant groups have positioned themselves as Jenin’s defenders.
In the Damaj neighborhood, a militant hot spot, Issam Abu Amira, 50, surveyed the blackened husk of what had once been his home. Fourteen houses in the camp were torched in total. While the Palestinian Authority blamed militants, Jenin’s mayor Mohammad Jarrar said authority forces were responsible.
Down the street, his cousin, Amjad, 24, pointed to the cracked glass where a bullet had pierced his parents’ bedroom window while they were sleeping. “Before this,” he said, “we had no problem with the PA.”
Now, his mother, Umm Ibrahim, chimed in, “we hate them.” Could she forgive the Palestinian Authority? “Never,” she said. The Israeli military strikes
In mid-January, community leaders in Jenin brokered a truce agreement that would have ended the campaign by the Palestinian security forces and allowed the militants to hold onto their weapons, as long as they were discreet.
The Israeli military seized the moment to resume airstrikes in Jenin, killing 12 people over two nights, according to the Palestinian health ministry. This was part of a major West Bank operation that has lasted more than three weeks, killing at least 25 people in the Jenin area — including the Funduq attackers — and displaced thousands of civilians, according to the Palestinian Authority, Israeli military and United Nations.
Israeli officials said their operation was necessary because the authority had failed to root out Iran-backed militancy. The authority has been “spectacularly unsuccessful in countering terrorism in Jenin in particular,” David Mencer, a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister’s office, said in a news conference last week.
But the campaign undermined the standing of the Palestinian Authority, and Palestinian officials and Middle East analysts said that might have been part of the intention for a right-wing government that includes ministers opposed to the authority’s existence.
“The minute the Gaza ceasefire went into effect, the operation started in the West Bank … On the political level, I see it as a way the [Israeli] government is asserting itself: It’s saying, ‘We still control you,’” said Zonszein.
The Israeli operation was “meant to embarrass the PA,” according to Jarrar, Jenin’s mayor. He added, “I told them: ‘The Israelis want you to be seen as crippled, ineffectual.’”
The sequence of events fueled the perception among Palestinians that Israel and the Palestinian Authority were working in tandem. The Israeli campaign flushed militants out of the camp, allowing Palestinian security officers to arrest dozens of fighters in the surrounding countryside.
The Palestinian security forces “laid the groundwork for the Israelis,” said Nasser, Umm Ibrahim’s husband.
Miriam Berger in Jericho, John Hudson in Washington and Heidi Levine in Jenin contributed to this report.
