As the Palestinian Authority (PA) based in the West Bank has witnessed the collapse of its government, policy makers in Washington and Tel Aviv have been plotting the execution of a plan to impose a governing force on the people of the Gaza Strip. Instead of seeking a democratic and economic solution to the crisis of Palestinian governance, the US is looking to solve every issue with violence.
In February, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister, Mohammed Shtayyeh, handed his resignation into PA President Mahmoud Abbas. Shtayyeh had stated that “the decision to resign came in light of the unprecedented escalation in the West Bank and Jerusalem and the war, genocide, and starvation in the Gaza Strip,” going on to talk about the Palestinian Authority and its goal to establish control over all Palestinian territory [meaning West Bank and Gaza]. With the resignation, Mahmoud Abbas appointed his longtime financial advisor, Mohammed Mustafa, as the new interim Prime Minister, allowing him to take his time to form a new government.
According to insider sources that spoke to Younis Tirawi, who is known to have high-level connections and an extensive knowledge of the Palestinian Authority’s internal politics, the resignation came primarily due to economic constraints on Mohammed Shtayyeh. However, the ushering in of Mohammed Mustafa has been hailed as a positive development by the US government, which has been engaged in talks with the Palestinian Authority in a bid to secure amendments to its governing structure and allow space for it to take over Gaza in a post war setting. The move has also drawn speculation that the PA is using this as an opportunity to form a more technocratic model of governance. Over the past year the PA President has made dramatic changes to the laws which govern the Palestinian Authority, including a move to keep PA Preventative Security chief Majed al-Farraj in a permanent position of power until the PA President terminates his contract.
In addition to Mahmoud Abbas giving himself more power over the legal and security branches of the PA, he also began removing local leaders of municipalities throughout the West Bank last year. This seemed to indicate that he was deciding against a system in which decision making power would be put into local government to a greater extent.
However, the idea that the Palestinian Authority is heading towards a stage in which it will declare national elections is rather slim. Also, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, maintains an arms length approach when dealing with the Palestinian Authority, only seeking to use them for their security coordination role in the West Bank. The Israeli Knesset recently passed a bill in which they rejected any unilateral recognition by the government of a Palestinian State, essentially declaring an end to any possibility for a Two-State solution, from their side.
Regardless of whether the US and EU, which provide the majority of the PA’s funding, endorsed the recent promotion of Mohammed Mustafa to Prime Minister, it is Israel that decides whether to release the Palestinian Authority’s tax revenues or not. Due to the massive economic constraints imposed on the West Bank, as of the beginning of the post-October 7 arm of the decades-long war on Gaza the number of Palestinians living inside the territory who are in poverty and unable to feed their families has doubled. The statistic provided to me in a recent conversation with Ubai al-Aboudi, who is the director of the Besan Center rights group in the West Bank, was that some 600,000 Palestinians, increased from 300,000, are now food insecure in the Palestinian territory.
In the Gaza Strip, the Israeli invading forces have been strangulating the entire population by depriving it of desperately needed aid, leading to the World Bank issuing a warning that roughly half of Gaza’s people are in a “catastrophe phase” of extreme hunger and will soon enter into famine. This deliberate Israeli policy of economically crippling both the West Bank and depriving Palestinians of even basic necessities in Gaza, has created a crisis in governance in both territories.
The US and Israel have appeared to be attempting to encourage local Palestinian families to manage the distribution of aid in Gaza, in a plot which would attempt to impose a new governing authority inside the besieged coastal enclave after the war. This plan entails attempting to use a newly formed “people’s committees” that has assembled in local areas to manage the retrieval, storage, and security of aid deliveries, and according to leaked reports, the US has signaled its intention to arm some of these groups. Yet, in other cases, Israel has assassinated members of these people’s committees, in one prominent case using a bomb against them while they gathered to retrieve aid in the Kuwait Roundabout area of Gaza City (Northern Gaza).
During Israel’s recent re-invasion of al-Shifa Hospital — now the fourth time — it specifically targeted aid workers, leading members of Gaza’s police force and a prominent member of the Interior Ministry, all people who were helping to manage aid distribution and provide security for them. It appears from the Israeli military tactics being implemented on the ground that they are attempting to engineer an environment of complete disorder and lawlessness in Gaza, in a bid to make way for imposing a force that they are backing inside the besieged territory.
One idea that has been floated and endorsed by a prominent member of Israel’s war government, Benny Gantz, is to use the West Bank PA’s Security head Majed al-Farraj, in order to begin forming a Palestinian Authority-led militia inside Gaza; the plan being for this force to eventually take over Gaza. However, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has opposed the idea of using Majed al-Farraj, as well as the idea of using former PA Preventative Security head, Mohammed Dahlan, in order to bring Gaza under some kind of PA security control. The Israeli PM also opposes such a plan in general, fearing the potential of a PA leadership in Gaza — the US government seems to support this notion.
When it comes to Hamas, which is the elected government in Gaza, they have tried in the past to sign an agreement with the PA in order for the West Bank based Palestinian Authority to take over administrative control of the Gaza Strip. That agreement was signed in 2017, yet broke down at the last moment after what appeared to be US pressure on the PA to back away from it and demand full security control over Gaza.
The US government and elements within the Israeli political establishment appear to favor PA security control over Gaza, which would mean the toppling of the Hamas security apparatus and armed groups therein. Meanwhile, inside of the West Bank, the US attempts to impose more amendments to the system of governance of the Palestinian Authority, as it has done various times before; each time creating an even more corrupt and repressive PA governing force in the West Bank. In early 2023, US security coordinator, Michael Fenzel, also drafted a plan which would have seen the PA security forces create a special division that would be trained by American forces in Jordan and work to kill and/or capture members of newly formed armed groups inside the West Bank. This has yet to materialize, but could potentially start a war between the armed groups and the PA inside the West Bank if implemented.
The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which currently represents the ‘State of Palestine’ at the United Nations, is headed by a corrupt dictator, Mahmoud Abbas, whom is called upon by some 80% of Palestinian to resign. The PA must undergo reforms, but not the kind which the US and Israel seek to impose. The 88-year-old Abbas has blocked all democratic national elections since 2006 (when Hamas ostensibly won the legislative elections) and even cancelled the last elections he announced in early 2021. Abbas has also dramatically altered the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO)’s charter, as well as PA law, to create a repressive, undemocratic, and overall despotic regime, one which only functions for the purpose of being an administrative body inside the West Bank and to use its some 70,000 strong security force to collaborate with the Israeli occupation army in the territory.
The formation of a new PA government means little if there is no agreement that is reached with Hamas and the other Palestinian political factions, an agreement which will lead to democratic national elections. In theory, Hamas has never had a problem with the Palestinian Authority taking over an administrative role inside Gaza, yet there is always the US and EU — along with Israel — which step in to prevent any unity or democratic election process. This is because genuine democratic elections will pave the way to a unified Palestinian national movement, which is representative of the Palestinian people and will serve their popular will, whether politically, administratively, or in the arena of security, and this is something that Israel has always fought to exterminate.
