As Israel raids the West Bank, where is the Palestinian Authority?

Israel’s large-scale military operations in the northern West Bank, now in their third week, have resulted in mass detentions and targeted killings, leaving behind huge destruction.

The assault on the West Bank - the largest since the Second Intifada in the early 2000s – is an extension of Israel’s wider campaign of mass arrests and killings in the territory since it began its war on Gaza nearly a year ago.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has decried the deadly incursions targeting the flashpoint cities of Jenin and Tulkarm, but just as with any other Israeli operation in the West Bank falling under its partial jurisdiction, the PA has been unable to do anything.

In addition to its powerlessness, however, the PA has also been acting in cooperation with Israeli forces by detaining wanted Palestinian youths and providing intelligence to Israel.

“The PA no longer has a political role to play, it’s a municipal authority,” Khaled Elgindy, director of the Programme on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs at the Middle East Institute (MEI) told The New Arab. “It cannot physically change anything on the ground.”

The PA’s presence in the West Bank has diminished in recent years, the analyst said, and within the past 18 months it has stopped operating in different parts of the north after being forced out by militant groups and locals due to a perceived lack of legitimacy among the Palestinian public.

According to Shatha Abdulsamad, a Palestinian researcher and policy analyst at the al-Shabaka think tank, the PA’s passive and collusive stance towards Israel’s military operations should be understood in the framework of the Oslo Accords, which granted it very limited sovereignty while allowing Israel to retain ultimate control over the West Bank and its population.

“There's a tension between Palestinians fighting for freedom and the PA trying to show it has authority for the sake of its political survival,” Abdulsamad said, adding that this has served to tighten Israel's grip on Palestinians through arrest raids, crushing dissent, repressing mass mobilisations, criminalising Palestinian resistance, and cracking down on individual freedoms and rights.

“Our own security forces and apparatus collaborate with the occupier at the expense of our own security and ability to resist the occupation,” the researcher remarked.

Palestinian political analyst and commentator Nour Odeh says that the Palestinian Authority’s powerlessness reflects how the world has enabled the “debilitation” of the PA, allowing Israel to strip it of its primary duty to protect its citizens by limiting its governance.

“It’s part of the natural progression of what world powers have permitted and bankrolled for over 30 years,” she told The New Arab.

Israel’s current West Bank operations seek to further undermine the PA, which is increasingly weakened. Seen as complicit in Israel’s devastating attacks on Palestinian cities, there is mounting exasperation among Palestinians.

A June 2024 poll found that 69% of respondents view the PA as a burden on the Palestinian people and 89% want Abbas to resign.

The Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority was set up in the mid-1990s as an interim governing body that would pave the way for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. Today it is regarded as having minimal actual authority and operates under the control of the Israeli military.

President Mahmoud Abbas has headed the PA for nearly 20 years and there have been no presidential elections since 2005 and no parliamentary polls since 2006, which Hamas won before taking over the Gaza Strip. To this day, the president has ruled by decree and has held on to power by cancelling elections and suppressing internal dissent.

Working with Israel through close security and intelligence coordination, the Palestinian administration is viewed by many Palestinians as a security subcontractor for the Israeli occupation. Abbas himself is deeply unpopular due to his and the PA’s rampant authoritarianism and corruption, their failure to provide a path towards Palestinian independence, and their inability to protect their people.

The administration has also struggled to pay the salaries of its workers in the last few years as the Israeli government has cut about 6.93 billion shekels ($1.8 billion) from Palestinian tax revenues, according to the latest statistics from the Palestinian Ministry of Finance.

These deductions, part of Tel Aviv's pressure campaign on the PA, affect its capacity to meet financial obligations to its citizens.

Under the Oslo Accords, Israel has full control over the Palestinian Authority’s fiscal revenues, collecting taxes and customs on its behalf and transferring them on a monthly basis.

“From the social contract to the provision of basic services, there’s a complete breakdown. Everything in Palestine is hanging by a very thin thread,” Odeh warned. 

The PA is incapable of stopping Israeli incursions in the West Bank, including in areas that are supposed to be under its control, and cannot prevent Israeli settlement expansion, protect Palestinians from attacks by both the army and settlers, or take action against restrictions imposed on Palestinians.

“The PA is politically impotent, it’s shrinking physically, its funding is drying up. It’s losing control on the ground, and it has lost public support,” said Elgindy, who previously served as an advisor to the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah on permanent status negotiations with Israel from 2004 to 2009.

“Abbas’ leadership has been reduced to surviving from one day to the next.”

Abdulsamad says the PA is dependent on international support, however minimal it often is. Despite the reality of the Israeli occupation, the international community has tried to ensure the authority doesn’t sink. “This has enabled Israel to continue its colonial project under the guise of a peace process or a two-state solution," she said.

Odeh also believes that the international community has an interest in keeping the Palestinian Authority “on life support” so as to maintain and manage the status quo of the last three decades. “Nobody has the political will for a real solution. They will pretend a semblance of functional governance that will be just enough to keep people afloat.”

The expansion of Israel’s war on Gaza into the West Bank is likely to put more pressure on the PA as the far-right Israeli government tries to minimise its dysfunctional role to secure tighter control over the Palestinian population.

“This latest operation is purely intended to break the will of the Palestinians through collective punishment,” Elgindy said.

Alessandra Bajec is a freelance journalist currently based in Tunis.

Follow her on Twitter: @AlessandraBajec