Shin Bet head met exiled PA Gaza security chief Dahlan in UAE — sources

Since falling out with Palestinian Authority president 15 years ago, former Fatah strongman has advocated for reforming PA and bringing democracy to West Bank and Strip

By ToI Staff and Jacob Magid

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26 May 2026, 10:47 am

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(L) Shin Bet director David Zini at Mount Herzl Military Cemetery in Jerusalem on April 21, 2026 (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90) (R) Mohammed Dahlan in the West Bank city of Ramallah, on January 3, 2011. (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed, File)

Shin Bet chief David Zini met with the Palestinian Authority’s exiled former Gaza security chief Mohammed Dahlan during a recent visit to the United Arab Emirates, two sources familiar with the matter confirmed to The Times of Israel on Tuesday.

The sources, who confirmed an earlier report in the Kan public broadcaster, declined to offer details on what was discussed during the meeting.

The Shin Bet said it would not comment on Zini’s schedule.

Dahlan, who headed the Palestinian Preventive Security Force in the Gaza Strip from its inception in 1994 until his resignation in 2002, has been a longtime critic of both Hamas and the current leadership of the Palestinian Authority, a fact for which he was exiled from Ramallah to Abu Dhabi in 2011.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas has long withstood calls to reconcile with Dahlan, who has become a close confidant of UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed and has been more freely able to criticize the PA’s conduct.

Abbas bucked an Egyptian effort to include members of Dahlan’s faction in a Fatah party conference that the PA president held earlier this month for the first time in over a decade, The Times of Israel revealed.

A 2024 report in The Wall Street Journal suggested that several officials, including in Israel, were pushing for Dahlan to oversee Gaza in the postwar era.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, right, and Mohammad Dahlan, left, leave a news conference in Egypt in February 2007. (AP/Amr Nabil)

The former Fatah strongman has been advocating for a postwar transition to democracy in Gaza since late October 2023, after Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israel sparked the war in the Palestinian enclave.

At the time, Dahlan told The Economist that he believed the Strip should be governed by a technocratic government for two years before heading to elections, based on a Palestinian state, even one without defined borders.

Such a borderless state could receive international backing from Arab countries, Dahlan argued, at which point it would be internationally recognized and able to forge a final agreement with Israel.

Despite similarities with his vision, there has been no confirmation that Dahlan is involved with US President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan for ending the Gaza war and ushering the war-torn enclave into a post-Hamas era.

Saudi news outlet Asharq Al-Awsat reported earlier this year, however, that he did have a role in the appointment of fellow Fatah security veteran Sami Nasam to head up the internal security and policing commission within the US-backed National Committee for the Administration of Gaza.