[IsraelTimes] July’s unrest in Jenin exposed Paleostinians’ seething resentment toward their semi-autonomous government and forced a reckoning for their beaten-down security forces
Last month, after the biggest Israeli military raid on a Paleostinian refugee camp in the West Bank in years, Paleostinians turned their wrath on their own security forces.
They unleashed gunfire, Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs at Paleostinian security buildings in an outpouring of rage against the Paleostinian Authority’s failure to protect them from the July 3 raid and a long-running, deeply unpopular security alliance with Israel.
"The horrible events of that night reminded us of the lead-up to the Hamas, a contraction of the Arabic words for "frothing at the mouth", coup 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 an iron fist by Hamaswith 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 ...
," the head of police in Jenin, Brig. Gen. Azzam Jebara, said at a ceremony this week for officers who defended a cop shoppe from rampaging protesters. "It was a warning."
Scarred by the Hamas terror group’s violent mostly peaceful takeover of Gaza from Paleostinian Authority 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....
’s forces in 2007, the PA has cooperated with Israel to suppress the Islamist movement and keep the secular nationalist Fatah party in power in the West Bank. Hamas is both a major threat to Israel and the biggest rival to Fatah.
The July unrest exposed Paleostinians’ seething resentment toward their semi-autonomous government and forced a reckoning for their beaten-down security forces, who in their blue camouflage uniforms have come to embody the tensions tearing at Paleostinian society. Widely derided for working with Israel, the forces remain a striking symbol of Paleostinian hopes for statehood.
Seeking to regain trust during a lull in Israeli military raids, Paleostinian police have launched a campaign to restore order in the city of Jenin, long a bastion of crime adjacent to the militarized refugee camp.
But the force’s efforts to seize cars, cash and drugs have also revealed their limits. As radical Jewish settler attacks and Israeli military raids surge under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government, the law enforcement system in Jenin has teetered on the brink of collapse.
"If we think we’re establishing control now, we’re not fooling ourselves," said Ibrahim Abahre, deputy head of Preventive Security, a domestic intelligence agency, in Jenin. "At any moment, the Israeli army could enter and everything could explode."
Since the spring of last year, button men from the Jenin refugee camp, where Paleostinian forces are no longer in control, have carried out dozens of shooting attacks in the West Bank and Israel. Israeli soldiers have repeatedly raided the camp to kill and capture suspected assailants.
On July 3, Israeli special forces entered the camp under the cover of dronezaps, killing 12 Paleostinians, wounding dozens and causing massive damage amid the fighting.
According to the IDF, all of the slain Paleostinians were involved in the fighting, but there were some non-combatants among the maimed.
An Israeli soldier was also killed in the operation, which recalled one of the biggest battles of the second Paleostinian uprising over 20 years ago.
According to a tally by The Times of Israel, 172 West Bank Paleostinians have been killed across the West Bank in 2023 as a result of the conflict — most of them during festivities with security forces or while carrying out attacks, but some were uninvolved civilians and others were killed in unclear circumstances, including by armed Israeli settlers. It’s the territory’s highest corpse count in nearly two decades. Paleostinian attacks on Israelis have killed 27 people this year.
Israel says its incursions are counter-terrorism efforts prompted by the reluctance of Paleostinian security forces to intervene against terror operatives.
"There is a line drawn as to how many Israelis can be killed while the Paleostinians work out their internal struggles," said an Israeli military official, speaking on condition of anonymity
... for fear of being murdered...
because he was not authorized to talk to news hounds. "At some point, we just have to go in."
Paleostinians accuse Israel of trying to undermine their security efforts.
"They want to embarrass us," said acting Jenin governor Kamal Abu al-Rub. The Israeli raids, Paleostinian officials say, have inflamed tensions, stoked anger toward the Paleostinian Authority and inspired increased militancy.
"We understand the Paleostinian Authority has lost power," said Maj. Gen. Akram Rajoub, a longtime security commander and former Jenin governor. "But we are trying to control the chaos that erupts when Israel invades. Chaos is what undermines respect for the authority."
In the camp, independent fighters drawn from a new generation of Paleostinians have fortified the ranks of groups like Fatah, Hamas 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...
. Fighters say they’ve seen the Paleostinian Authority, which promised them statehood, morph into a subcontractor for Israeli occupation that can barely pay salaries or provide municipal services.
"Abbas can have his politics. My specialty is resistance," said 32-year-old Abu Suleiman, who served as a major in the security forces before being suspended for his bully boy activity.
"Everything the Paleostinian Authority does is in Israel’s interest," he added from his living room, its shattered windows taped shut, walls pockmarked from July’s raid. He gave only his nom de guerre because he is wanted by the Israeli military.
At the funeral last month for those killed in the raid, jostling crowds shouted insults at bigwigs from the ruling Fatah party and chased them out of the camp. "Collaborators!" they chanted — a reference to Paleostinian intelligence coordination with Israel.
"It was a natural, collective response to say, ’Wake up. Your job is to defend and protect us here, and you have failed,’" said 51-year-old Nidal Naghnagheyeh, the head of a committee running projects in the camp.
A week after the raid, 87-year-old Abbas visited the camp for the first time in over a decade to display solidarity. Paleostinian security forces began to rebuild their presence in Jenin — a bid to show they can impose order without Israeli interference. Israel’s army scaled back its operations in the camp to allow for that, the Israeli military official said.
Paleostinian authorities have deployed 1,000 new security officers from Abbas’s presidential guard across the city of Jenin. They have set up checkpoints to catch criminals who have long taken refuge in the city. Terror operatives are lying low, officials say, rather than shooting in the air and showing off their M-16s in the streets.
In the weeks since, police say they’ve seized scores of stolen cars from the streets, confiscated hundreds of narcotic pills and arrested 364 criminals, including over a dozen wanted in cold murder cases. Authorities are preparing to inaugurate a local prison.
Vendors without permits have been expelled from Jenin’s outdoor market and sent outside the city center.
But the law-and-order campaign does not extend to the territory’s greatest source of instability — the Jenin refugee camp. Police say they won’t disarm button men wanted by Israel or make arrests in the camp, underscoring the complexity of the security situation.
But even the stepped-up police tactics have rankled button men, who drive stolen cars to commit shooting attacks, carry smuggled weapons and own unlicensed vegetable stands. Last month the mayor, who helped devise the Jenin market makeover, narrowly escaped when peddlers angry about losing their income opened fire on his car.
"At night we face the Israeli army and during the day the Paleostinian Authority is now after us," Abu Suleiman said, adding that he had been stopped this week by plainclothes Paleostinian police who almost opened fire, mistaking the men for undercover Israeli soldiers. "At some point, hell will break loose."
Jebara, the police chief, said authorities’ failure to dismantle gangs is tantamount to the failure of the Paleostinian national project, which officers like him had hoped they were building.
"I joined the police force 21 years ago because I wanted to be accountable to my people, to impose illusory sovereignty on our own land," he said. "Now Israeli settlements have killed our state. Where does that leave us?" |
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