Abu Mazen’s PA attacks the West Bank under orders from Washington

Amin Qudsi
Gunmen loyal to Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority have been raiding houses in Jenin since the weekend, engaging in open gun battle with residents opposing the Zionists.
They are wrestling to exert control of the West Bank ahead of a likely shakeout in Palestinian politics after the Gaza genocide.
Abbas is under pressure from Washington to flex some muscle and show some support to his paymasters in Tel Aviv, the New York Times reports.
Doing Washington’s bidding
Forces of the PA moved into Jenin in early December and have since clashed with fighters from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. At least three people have been killed.
The Palestinian Authority announced the “crackdown” in the West Bank on Saturday, sending armored vehicles through Jenin., Middle East Eye reports. Its merecenaries in armoured personnel carriers have set up checkpoints around the city and outside the adjacent refugee camp, despite residents’ protests.
Reuters reports violent clashes in other West Bank cities including Tubas in the Jordan Valley and Tulkarm in the north.
The PA mercenaries were there to “put an end to sedition and chaos,” said their leader Anwar Rajab, a spokesman for the PA’s security services.
The PA is still the only recognised authority under the Oslo Peace accords and is the only body recognised by the West in international negotiations, as the legal successor to the PLO.
Political analysts warned that the PA’s decision to throw it lot in with the Zionists showed it was parting ways with the rest of Palestine’s factions who had agreed earlier in the year in talks in Russia to unite under the PLO banner.
Proving its ‘worth’
“This situation cannot be allowed to continue. It is unfortunate that we now need to deploy security forces to impose order,” said Mohammad Mustafa, the so-called Palestinian prime minister, even though he’s never been elected. “But we will not watch our country be destroyed and be silent.”
The timing of the operation is a sign that the PA has to “prove its worth” as it seeks to uphold its role in the West Bank while preparing for a possible future role in Gaza, Hani al-Masri, a Palestinian political analyst in Ramallah told Reuters.
For the duration of the Gaza Genocide, West Bank cities like Jenin and Tulkarm have endured a deadly cycle of Israeli army and settler raids and drone strikes, which have devastated Palestinian neighborhoods.
In an effort to intensify the de facto siege of the West Bank, US officials recently urged the Palestinian Authority to escalate law-and-order operations in the West Bank, the NYT reports.
US officials also asked Israel to rein in its preparations to expel Palestinians from the West Bank. PA security forces are funded and trained in part by the United States and Israel.
Sell-out orgnisation
Washington and its allies hope the PA will rule postwar Gaza, although Israel has rejected the idea.
While the authority has international backing, it has always been a sell-out organisation, contrived to serve the interests of the West against the ordinary interests of Palestinians.
At home, it is hugely unpopular and increasingly fragile. Many Palestinians see the body as ineffectual and corrupt, something even a propagandistic channel like the New York Times recognises.
That fact alone, makes its precious to both Washington and Tel Aviv.
Palestinian militants now hold sway in parts of the West Bank where the authority’s legitimacy has never been recognised. Some are affiliated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, while many others have joined new bands fighting Israel and the authority.
Israeli officials quite rightly point to militancy in the West Bank as evidence that the authority is incapable of running Gaza after the genocide. Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in 2007 after it won elections, unlike the PA, sparking a short and brutal civil war with the authority’s leaders who didn’t want to give up control to democracy.
Facing an incoming Trump administration and an emboldened Israeli right-wing, Mahmoud Abbas, the authority’s “president”, is worried about being sidelined, said Tahani Mustafa, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, a Washington-aligned think tank.
Prelude to ethnic cleansing
Israeli troops have terrorised Palestinian neighborhoods for weeks at a time, as bulldozers destroy infrastructure and lay people’s lives to waste, chewing through roads and homes “looking for explosives, tunnels and militants”. The Israeli military says its soldiers were compelled to conduct the deadly raids, but they’re really making life unlivable in preparation for a mass expulsion of Palestinians into Lebanon.
Saturday’s raid focused on the Jenin refugee camp, a built-up neighborhood founded decades ago by Palestinian refugees displaced by the Nakba genocide in 1948.
Warlord Rajab said that Palestinian forces were continuing to make arrests and wage a destructive vandalism campaign in an attempt to “regain control of the Jenin camp from lawbreakers who ruin the lives of the citizenry.” He had no idea how long the operation would last.
Yazid Jaayseh, a “militant leader”, was killed in the raid, Rajab said. Hamas mourned Jaayseh’s passing, but did not claim him as a member. Hamas said the authority’s crackdown was “absolutely identical to Israel’s aggression and criminality.”
Omar Obeid, 62, a resident of Jenin’s refugee camp, bewailed the betrayal: “None of this fighting should ever have happened. We need a bigger solution.”
Palestinian forces had already begun to deploy more aggressively in Jenin over last week, before the operation was announced on Saturday.
It didn’t take long for the civilian bodies to start falling.
PA mercenaries kiled Rabhi Shalabi, 19. Palestinians had initially blamed “lawbreakers” for Shalabi’s death.