Hamas says West Bank arrests prove security cooperation ongoing
Dozens held in joint West Bank campaign between Palestinian and Israeli forces, despite call by PLO to cut off security ties
Elhanan Miller is the former Arab affairs reporter for The Times of Israel
The Palestinian Authority arrested dozens of Hamas operatives across the West Bank Sunday night and Monday morning, in a move the Islamic movement said ran counter to a PLO decision to halt security coordination with Israel.
According to Hamas daily Al-Resalah, Palestinian and Israeli forces apprehended more than 80 Hamas officials in the raid, including released prisoners, charity workers and students.
Hamas official Ismail al-Askar called the PA’s ongoing security cooperation with Israel an act of national betrayal, and “a knife in the back of the Palestinian people.
The Fatah-led Palestinian Authority has continued to carry out arrests against members of the Hamas group in the West Bank, despite a unity deal reached between the rival movements last June.
The PA has been emboldened in its crackdown by an Egyptian court decision branding Hamas a terror organization late last month.
The Israeli military declined to comment to The Times of Israel and there was no immediate confirmation of the raid from the PA.
Hamas official Ismail Radwan told the Quds Press news agency Monday that the raids proved that a decision by the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Council on March 5 to end security cooperation with Israel “was not worth the paper it was written on.”
“This vicious campaign against the movement proves that Fatah does not want reconciliation, and constantly tries to thwart it through arrests and other daily measures,” Radwan said. “Instead of implementing the decisions of the PLO’s Central Council by stopping the security coordination and resuming reconciliation talks … the PA continues its security coordination and its policy of political arrests against Hamas leaders and ex-prisoners.”
Hamas spokesman Husam Badran said the arrests were directly linked to a recent acknowledgment by Israel’s Shin Bet internal security agency that 80 percent of the “resistance” attacks in the West Bank were carried out by Hamas.
“These arrests came to prove to the occupation that the [Palestinian] security agencies are carrying out what’s expected of them,” Badran wrote of Facebook Monday morning.
“We place full responsibility for this campaign against Hamas on PA President Abbas and Prime Minister [Rami] Hamdallah, and for the continued lack of freedoms in the West Bank,” he added.
In a separate incident, PA security forces recently arrested three Hamas activists in Ramallah suspected of vandalizing a memorial to Jordanian pilot Muaz Kasasbeh, who was burned to death by the Islamic State terror group in January. The memorial was spray-painted with expressions of support for Islamic State.
Avi Issacharoff contributed to this report.
