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Palestinian Authority Fails to Show It Can Maintain Order in West Bank

(Washington Post) Claire Parker - The Palestinian Authority recently launched a major military operation against militant groups in Jenin in the West Bank. If the operation succeeded, Palestinian security forces would demonstrate they could maintain order not only in the West Bank, but perhaps in Gaza as well. But the six-week campaign in Jenin came up badly short and exposed some of the challenges the PA would face in securing Gaza. The campaign also underlined questions about how far Palestinians would go to fight fellow Palestinians. While Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has said there must be no role for the PA in Gaza, an alternative Arab plan to counter President Trump's Gaza proposal 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?" The U.S. government has given Palestinian security forces $1.1 billion since 2007, State Department officials said, and has supervised their training in Jordan. "If the end result is that everybody in the world - and especially the U.S. and the Arab countries - sees that the PA can't get control of 100 militants in Jenin, how can they secure Gaza?" said Mairav Zonszein, senior Israel analyst at the International Crisis Group. Compared with raids by Israeli troops, for the militants, the PA operation was "a break, a vacation," said Jihad, a senior member of the Jenin Battalion. He claimed that only a handful of those arrested by the PA were members of the battalion and that only one fighter had been killed by the security forces. PA forces, meanwhile, lost six members, and many others sustained injuries.
2025-02-23 00:00:00
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