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2024-10-27 Israel-Palestine-Jordan
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Abbas treads tightrope as PA cracks down on terror groups in the West Bank
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[IsraelTimes] Campaign in Tubas shows authority’s resolve to disprove its many skeptics, but represents ‘low-hanging fruit’ unlikely to loosen Hamas, PIJ grip on West Bank’s north, says analyst
In the West Bank city of Tubas, the Paleostinian Authority has been rounding up terror operatives who are spoiling for a fight with Israel and challenging its own rule, seeking to show it can help shape the future for Paleostinians after the war in Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response ...
PA President the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas
...aka Abu Mazen, a graduate of the prestigious unaccredited Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow with a doctorate in Holocaust Denial. While no Yasser Arafat, he has his own brand of evil, just a little more lowercase....>
has poured forces into Tubas in an avowed push to quash lawlessness and deny Israel pretexts to raid the city.
His adversaries, Hamas
 ..not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,...
and Paleostinian Islamic Jihad
...created after many members of the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood decided the organization was becoming too moderate. Operations were conducted out of Egypt until 1981 when the group was exiled after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. They worked out of Gaza until they were exiled to Lebanon in 1987, where they clove tightly to Hezbollah. In 1989 they moved to Damascus, where they remain a subsidiary of Hezbollah...
(PIJ), say the PA is serving Israel’s agenda at a time when Israel is going after their operatives in the West Bank as they battle Israel in Gaza, sharpening old divisions between Abbas and the terror groups.
Residents of Tubas said festivities between the murderous Moslems and the PA this month involved heavy machine guns and bombs in some of the worst violence they can remember.
It highlights the precarious position of the PA, which was established by the 1994 Oslo Accords with Israel, as a stepping stone to a Paleostinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The so-called two-state solution appears as far as ever, though it has come back into international focus of late as a way to bring peace. Israel, however, mistrusts Abbas and the PA, accusing it of incitement to terrorism in its education system and by paying stipends to tossed in the calaboose
Drop the rod and step away witcher hands up!
terror operatives and families of slain terrorists.
Abbas’s secularist Fatah faction also recently issued condolences on the "martyrdom" of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, hailing as "a great national leader" the architect of the assault that sparked the Gaza war on October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led murderous Moslems stormed southern Israel to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages.
Amid the war in Gaza, Israel has also launched several counterterrorism raids across the West Bank, especially in the north. The army says it has arrested 5,250 wanted Paleostinians, including 2,050 affiliated with Hamas.
According to the PA health ministry, 716 Paleostinians have been killed in the raids. Israel says the vast majority were button men killed in exchanges of fire, rioters who clashed with troops or murderous Moslems carrying out attacks.
The Ramallah-based PA controlled Gaza until 2007, when Hamas routed forces loyal to Abbas, but is now confined to running patches of the West Bank — often in coordination with Israeli security forces, who control the territory.
The United States has said it wants to see the war in Gaza end with the Strip and the West Bank unified under a reformed and revitalized PA.
For Abbas, 88, the Tubas campaign is partly about weakening the grip Hamas and PIJ have gained over the northern West Bank, in what his Fatah sees as an Iran-backed attempt to undermine its position, according to Fatah officials and security sources.
It is also about disproving critics who view the PA as ineffective — a reputation that has overshadowed US-led diplomatic contacts over the role it might eventually play in Gaza, according to a former PA security official and an analyst.
A US State Department spokesperson declined comment on the Tubas operation, but acknowledged that US security cooperation with the PA includes funding, training and equipment.
Tubas Governor Ahmed al-Asaad said the PA had decided to strike with "an iron fist" against what he described as lawlessness and anarchy.
Two PA coppers have been maimed as their forces fought members of the "Tubas Battalion," an gang dominated by PIJ, and detained at least three of its members, including its leader.
STANDOFF
Al-Asaad said the PA was responding to public concern, giving the example of a bomb that had been recently planted near a school — apparently in preparation for an attack on Israeli forces.
"We don’t want — under the slogan of resistance or any other slogan — to destroy our country and to destroy Tubas," he said.
"Our approach is clear and is the approach of the president: the approach of peaceful, popular resistance and safeguarding security and order," he told Rooters in an interview.
The Paleostinian Authority has overhauled its operations in a variety of areas, assuaging some of the concern expressed by countries that provide aid.
On the whole, the revitalization effort had been "pretty well received," a European diplomat said.
On Saturday, dozens of PA coppers surrounded a building near Tubas where two Battalion button men were holed up, with one of them, Obada al-Masri, threatening to blow himself up, a source familiar with the incident said.
"We negotiated with him for almost five hours," said his father, Abdel Majid al-Masri, who was called to the scene to help convince his son to surrender.
He said his son eventually agreed after receiving guarantees he would be held in Tubas rather than at another PA jail where he was previously incarcerated and had suffered mistreatment.
Masri expressed relief that his son had been taken into PA custody rather than killed by Israeli forces, which have also been raiding Tubas in search of terror operatives and had previously tossed in the calaboose
Drop the rod and step away witcher hands up!
his son for three years.
His son had chosen "the route of struggle to liberate Paleostine," he said, rejecting PA accusations that Battalion members were engaged in lawlessness.
PIJ condemned the operation, saying PA forces appeared to be aiming to eliminate resistance to Israel and their methods were no different.
LOW-HANGING FRUIT
PA security forces were heavily deployed, with a checkpoint on a road into the city, when Rooters visited Tubas this week, but the city was calm.
Ghaith al-Omari, an expert on PA affairs at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the Tubas campaign was a much-needed attempt by the PA to assert itself in a part of the West Bank where its control had been "practically absent."
"The PA understands that nobody sees it as being capable of running Gaza and everyone cites the fact that they can’t even run the northern West Bank," said Omari, who has advised both Abbas and his predecessor, Yasser Arafat.
But one operation did not make a reputation, Omari said, noting that Tubas represented "low-hanging fruit" and that Hamas and PIJ were weaker there than in Jenin, also in the northern West Bank.
With US support, the 35,000-strong PA security forces were reconstituted after the 2007 Hamas takeover of Gaza.
Yet, the Washington Institute said in a July policy note, for the PA to assume governance in Gaza it would need extensive recruitment, equipment, vetting and training, a process it said would take years.
Israel, which accuses the PA of support for terrorism, has also rejected the notion of PA governance in Gaza.
While declining to comment on a potential role for PA security forces in post-war Gaza, the US State Department spokesperson reiterated that sustained peace in Gaza "must include Paleostinian-led governance and Gaza unified with the West Bank under the Paleostinian Authority."
In the West Bank, the biggest issue was that PA security forces were "really, really unpopular in the north," Omari said.
A September opinion poll showed that 89% of Paleostinians in the West Bank want Abbas to resign, and that Hamas has more support than Fatah there. Polls by the Paleostinian Center for Policy and Survey Research have consistently shown that Marwan Barghouti, a Fatah leader tossed in the calaboose
Drop the rod and step away witcher hands up!
by Israel for murder, would win any presidential vote.
Omari said: "To do effective security you need both capabilities but also you need credibility and legitimacy." 
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Posted by trailing wife 2024-10-27 2024-10-27 01:49||
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