The PA returning to Gaza? It can’t even control the West Bank
Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority is losing its grip in Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarem. Two decades after Hamas forced it out, it is not remotely capable of reasserting itself in Gaza

I was speaking last week with a Palestinian man from the village of Haris in the northern West Bank. Our conversation mainly focused on villagers’ clashes with the IDF and with settlers in the area, but at one point he referred to something that “the head of state” had said the other day.
“Your head of state?” I asked.
“Yours, the Israeli prime minister,” he answered laughing. “Our head of state is sleeping.”
The comment, and the derision with which it was delivered, provide an insight into Palestinians’ widespread view of Mahmoud Abbas, 88, now in his 19th year as the head of the Palestinian Authority and regarded by the Biden administration and much of the Arab world as the preferred choice to govern Gaza on the elusive “day after” the war.
Even putting aside the disdain, indeed the loathing, among most Palestinians for their president (multiple surveys in recent years have shown that two-thirds of them want him out of office), and even ignoring for a second the Israeli government’s hostility to the PA (including, notably, for the stipends it pays to terrorists), there are some serious challenges to the notion of bringing the PA back to Gaza almost 20 years after it was brutally expelled by Hamas, which murdered dozens of members of Abbas’s main Fatah faction.
Two decades after the PA’s exit from Gaza, its capacity for governance is fast declining in the territory that wasn’t taken by Hamas — the West Bank. Corruption, a perennial financial deficit and political stagnation have exacerbated the built-in disadvantages of what was supposed to be only a temporary institution.
Over the last two years, armed groups affiliated with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organizations have accrued growing power in the northern West Bank – especially Jenin, Nablus and Tulkarem. The PA’s security forces do not operate in parts of these cities, which are controlled by the armed militias.
These groups mostly focus their aim on Israelis, but they sometimes clash with the PA forces, especially when attempts are being made to arrest their members. A recent rare arrest of a Hamas member by PA security forces in Nablus triggered 24 hours of chaos in the city, with crowds of Palestinians blocking streets and throwing stones at their own PA forces.
With that in mind, it’s hard to imagine how the same PA security forces could return to the Gaza Strip and reassert genuine control.
Hamas has been depleted by the IDF over eight months of war, but it still has thousands of gunmen and no intention of being easily forced to give up Gaza.
And unlike in 2007, it is now the incumbent, with the immense advantage of having controlled the population for the last 17 years.
As widely rumored in Arab media in March, and highlighted again just this week by the UK’s Telegraph, Hamas reportedly executed the head of Gaza City’s Doghmush clan, which was apparently earmarked by Israel for a governance role in a postwar, post-Hamas Gaza. Who’s to say Hamas won’t do the same to any returning PA official?
Precisely how and where the PA might attempt to recruit its potential future representatives in the Strip is unclear. The PA security forces are lacking in manpower in the West Bank, and certainly don’t have reserves to send to Gaza.
The PA does continue to pay the salaries of 40,000 Gazans, but most of them are middle-aged ex-government officials, with questionable loyalty after long years under Hamas rule.
The bottom line is that any attempt to bring the PA back to Gaza would require a major reform of the PA’s institutions — covering integrity, efficiency, governance capability and a whole lot more. To have any prospect of success, this would need to be carried out as part of a credible process, with a timeline, for the PA to be replaced with a Palestinian state.
That is not only a years-long process, but one that seems beyond the bounds of possibility in the current political situation — given the dire state of Israeli-Palestinian ties and the internal Palestinian feuds.
Unless or until these challenges are addressed, the people who speak airily about “the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza” are as unrealistic as those in Israel talking grandly about “total victory.”
The writer is a Palestinian affairs reporter at Kan (Israel’s public broadcaster)
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