Tahani Mustafa
International Crisis Group / March 4, 2025
The Palestinian Authority (PA), which has long been subject to Israel’s pleasure and frequently borne the brunt of outside displeasure, has seen its position become much more precarious of late. Launched in January, Israel’s ‘Operation Iron Wall’, which has targeted Palestinian communities across the West Bank, devastating refugee camps in the north of the territory, has deepened the PA’s already acute existential crisis. Palestinians blame the Authority either for weakness in the face of Israeli aggression or for active cooperation with the occupying power. Meanwhile, Israel accuses it of being ineffective in suppressing Palestinian militants, even as Israel’s own actions undermine its finances and operational capacity.
Israel commenced ‘Operation Iron Wall’ on 21 January, two days after the ceasefire in Gaza took effect, greatly intensifying its military action to quash Palestinian armed resistance in the West Bank. The operation has gone after armed groups that had emerged in the Jenin, Tulkarm, Nur Shams and Tubas refugee camps in response to a previous round of heavy-handed Israeli raids in the immediate aftermath of the 7 October 2023 attacks. Israeli forces have wreaked such extensive destruction in these camps and adjacent urban areas that residents have described their neighbourhoods as “mini-Gazas”. At least 40,000 people have been rendered homeless and expelled from the camps. According to Israeli officials, they will not be allowed back anytime soon. Earlier, the PA had mounted operations of its own aimed at reining in armed groups in Tubas and Jenin. These had led the armed groups to agree to disband, but after Israel’s onslaught that promise has been rendered moot.
The predicament in which the PA finds itself highlights the core dilemma of the Palestinian national movement: whether to resist an ever more oppressive occupation – and, if so, how – or to cooperate with Israel. For the PA, cooperation has entailed not just fighting Palestinian armed groups, but also attempting to quash non-violent forms of dissent, in anticipation of concessions from Israel that would improve the conditions of Palestinians’ lives and thereby lessen the impulse to take up arms or take to the streets. The return for the PA was always understood to include a path to Palestinian statehood, but Israel has consistently failed to meet expectations in this and other regards.
The Trump administration’s inconsistent but alarming statements about the occupied territories – notably that it might support the removal of Palestinians from Gaza, develop the strip under U.S. control and stand aside while Israel annexes the West Bank – have also upended long-held assumptions about the future, seemingly throwing open possibilities that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government hitherto could scarcely have imagined the U.S. would countenance. Even as it gives weapons and full-throated support to the most far-right government in Israel’s history, the Trump administration has suspended aid to the PA, further diminishing its capacity to deliver simply salaries and basic services, let alone security.
Evolving militancy in the West Bank
The backdrop to today’s West Bank turmoil is the reconfiguration of Palestinian militancy in the wake of the second intifada (2000-2005), as the promise of Palestinian statehood faded with Israel’s occupation becoming ever more entrenched.
For many years after the intifada sputtered to an end, the West Bank saw little armed resistance to the occupation. In 2007, PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, under President Mahmoud Abbas, who had been elected two years earlier, instituted a new security architecture, restructured the economy and introduced far-ranging political reforms. He did so even as Israel reshaped the West Bank’s geography, building a barrier separating the territory from Israel and thickening the web of checkpoints set up during the 2000-2005 unrest.
These developments succeeded in suppressing organised armed resistance, which by 2015 was increasingly replaced by more diffuse acts, such as assaults with knives or vehicles on individual Israelis. Such “lone wolf” attacks were, for the most part, born of despair. The assailants generally had no getaway plan; they knew that they would likely be killed or imprisoned for life. Their victims included civilians inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders as well as soldiers and West Bank settlers – with the result that the attacks did less to further Palestinian national aspirations than to accelerate the rightward drift of Israeli politics. While it is hard to generalise about the motives of disparate individuals, commentators and West Bank Palestinians interviewed by Crisis Group argue that the chief driver of the “lone wolf” attacks was a loss of hope that the conciliatory Abbas-Fayyad policies would end the occupation, or even lighten its burdens on Palestinian daily life, as settlements relentlessly expanded.
But by 2021, these individual acts began to give way again to more organised militancy. The immediate trigger was Abbas’s abrupt decision to cancel long-promised PA presidential and legislative elections. Abbas had repeatedly extended his own term of office since 2009, and Palestinians had not voted for lawmakers since 2006. The scheduled vote had offered the prospect of changing a leadership many viewed as corrupt, ineffective, acting on Israel’s behalf and more concerned with its own survival than with Palestinian national interests. But there were deeper causes than the cancelled polls. Across the West Bank, local groups arose in response to the profound social, political and economic malaise affecting the Palestinian national movement, declining standards of living a quarter-century after the 1993-1994 Oslo accords, which had set up the PA as a sort of Palestinian state in waiting, and the failure of Palestinian institutions to stop the violence of a seemingly never-ending military occupation. In frustrating hopes for peaceful political renewal, Abbas catalysed the re-emergence of armed groups as a palpable symbol of Palestinian discontent with both Israeli occupation and PA governance.
In 2022, the inclusion of far-right extremists in the Israeli government raised Palestinian fears that the military occupation would harden – fears that were soon realised. Not only did Israeli army incursions increase in frequency and violence. The pace of land confiscation and settlement expansion picked up as well, even as strictures on Palestinian freedom of movement in the West Bank tightened.
The emerging Palestinian armed groups attracted disaffected youths from a range of political parties – Fatah, which controls the PA, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, among others. While they allegedly received funds from outside sources, notably Iran, they lacked coordination or an overall leadership. They had no political program or ambition beyond defending their neighbourhoods from Israeli raids, which were occurring more often. Many of their actual attacks were symbolic, striking military buildings or equipment rather than personnel, and they used lethal violence only against Israeli soldiers making incursions into their neighbourhoods. The distinction was intentional, militants claim, as they were aware of the disproportionate response Israel would mount if they were to attack settlers or soldiers. The constant churn in these groups’ membership, due to Israeli and PA repression, prevented the development of a coherent strategic vision or even consistency of purpose. Some members acted from political motivations, while others sought self-aggrandisement or hoped to wrest something from the PA, perhaps a job or a pardon for a crime.
The young men who joined such groups drew on a social memory of armed struggle, launched by the Palestine Liberation Organisation in the 1960s and continued through the second intifada, but they had no lived experience of it. If the founders of groups like the Jenin Brigade and Lions’ Den (the latter based in the West Bank’s biggest city, Nablus) had a political creed, it was that the new generation needed to be inspired to catalyse change in Palestinian politics. Members of the armed groups have told Crisis Group that since nothing else seemed to work, they chose to make a show of armed resistance as a visible demonstration of their opposition to a manifestly unjust status quo.
At first, these groups were based in the major towns and adjacent refugee camps. But after Israel killed the founders, young men gravitated toward groups from neighbouring localities, especially smaller towns and villages in the triangle formed by Nablus, Tulkarm and Jenin. Exposed in their own towns and villages, they sought refuge in the dense urban landscape of the bigger refugee camps or, in the case of the Lions’ Den, in the old city of Nablus.
Israeli raids spur return to armed resistance
Israel and the PA had largely succeeded in suppressing these groups by the autumn of 2023. But Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, followed by Israeli crackdowns intended to stifle Palestinian resistance in the West Bank amid the devastation in Gaza gave them a new lease on life. A rising tide of settler violence was another spur. Young Palestinian men rallied under the slogan “unity of fronts”, a reference to the multi-front attacks on Israel carried out by members of the Iran-backed “axis of resistance” which included Hizbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, as well as the two largest active Palestinian militant organisations, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which were both known to financially and logistically support the armed groups in the West Bank. Some of these groups were reincarnations of the ones that had been expunged shortly before, drawing in fresh members, but some were new, such as the 313, an Iran-backed outfit in Jenin.
For their part, the PA security forces were increasingly discredited when they appeared to stand aside as Israeli soldiers and settlers rampaged through ostensibly Palestinian-controlled towns and cities. Israeli restrictions curtailed the PA personnel’s movements while also throttling much of the West Bank economy, which has additionally been suffering from Israel’s withholding of Palestinian tax revenues. Israel has also long limited the PA security forces’ access to training and equipment, including bulletproof vests, heavy automatic weaponry and armoured vehicles – all items allowed them under the Oslo accords that created the PA – so as to diminish the risk of their posing a threat to heavily armed Israeli troops. Meanwhile, Abbas’s popularity, already low, plummeted further with his blanket condemnation of the violence unleashed by Hamas in October 2023, with the Palestinian president going so far as to state that it was “our duty” to provide security for Israel, even as Israel began decimating Gaza and bombed cities and camps in the West Bank.
After the groups re-emerged in late 2023, the PA initially relied on its “surrender program” – an iteration of its longstanding strategy of co-opting and buying off dissent – to counter them, while Israel fought them with artillery, fighter-bombers and helicopter gunships. The PA security forces lacked the capacity for intensive military operations, and in any case would have risked severe political backlash had it moved aggressively against Palestinian militants while the toll of Israel’s war in Gaza mounted. Even so, when it became clear, by July 2024, that its conciliation efforts had failed, the PA moved to clamp down on what it described as “lawlessness and anarchy”. In doing so, it had several considerations in mind. The PA sought to pre-empt anything similar to the Israeli onslaught in Gaza from happening in the West Bank. It also intended to block what Fatah – President Abbas’s party – described as an Iran-backed attempt by Hamas to undermine the PA’s position. Lastly, it spied a chance for the PA’s forces to demonstrate to Israel and the U.S. that they could run security in post-war Gaza, in the hope that a renewed PA role in the coastal enclave could help reunite the two parts of the putative Palestinian state.
In October 2024, the PA launched Operation Protecting the Nation, with Israeli approval and the active support of the U.S., which at the time was coordinating the PA security forces’ major operations and providing them with technical assistance. In a show of force, the PA first moved against the Tubas Battalion, one of the less hardcore groups and an easier target based in the Tubas refugee camp in the north-eastern West Bank. After heavy clashes, and after the PA had cut off the camp’s electricity and water supply, 80 members of the group surrendered and several were arrested, including the leader. The fact that Israel had just humbled Iran’s ally Hizbollah in Lebanon may have played a part in Tubas Battalion’s decision to give up, as its fighters may have realised that no outside party would be coming to their aid.
The PA tries to prove its mettle in Jenin
Emboldened by its success in Tubas, on 5 December 2024 the PA went after the Jenin Brigades, the strongest and most committed of the armed groups. The operation began after PA security personnel arrested a brigade member in Jenin camp, finding money on his person that they alleged came from Iran. In response, the group seized two PA vehicles and paraded them in the camp. The PA, in turn, used this action as a pretext for an all-out attack on the group, deploying more than 1,000 officers in Jenin against a reported 83 brigade members.
After a six-week siege in which the PA shut off this camp’s electricity and water as well, the Jenin Brigades agreed to de-escalate. On 10 January, in a deal brokered by local factions and civic organisations, the group committed to surrender their arms, allowing PA personnel to operate freely in the camp and to arrest any member who did not comply. The operation’s toll was not insignificant. One militant died, 249 suspected sympathisers were arrested and six PA officers were killed along with eight unarmed civilians, while 2,000 families – roughly 10,000 people – were temporarily displaced.
Then-U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration trumpeted the PA’s operation as a success, declaring it a way for the PA to prove that it can help restore Israel’s sense of security after the 7 October 2023 attack. The implication was that if the PA could do this job in the West Bank, it could do the same in Gaza. A Jenin camp resident told The Guardian that “everyone knows [the PA security forces] are in Jenin to send a signal to the Israelis and to America that they can handle security and take control of Gaza again”. In the event, however, the PA’s forces never had a chance to test this proposition.
Israel intervenes
In January, with rumours swirling of an impending ceasefire in Gaza, Israel began signalling it was dissatisfied with the PA’s progress in tackling the armed groups in the West Bank. First, as the PA security forces went into Jenin, the Israeli army staged concurrent raids on militants in the Tulkarm and Balata refugee camps. Then, on 14 January, it launched a drone strike that killed six people in Jenin camp, where the PA was in the process of disarming the Jenin Brigades. The PA condemned the attack, which Palestinians saw as an attempt to undermine its newly reasserted authority. From its side, Israel justified its action by citing a roadside bomb that had injured three Israeli soldiers in Qabatiya, a village near Jenin, earlier the same day.
A week later, Israel moved into Jenin camp in full force. It placed Jenin camp and city under siege and prevented civil defence personnel from entering, deploying Apache attack helicopters, fighter-bombers and drones to support ground units. It has characterised its offensive as a counter-terrorism action, asserting that the PA’s forces had failed to eradicate armed groups.
Operation Iron Wall has already become the longest such Israeli campaign in the West Bank since the second intifada. It quickly expanded across the northern West Bank with foci in Jenin, Tulkarm, Tubas, Tamun and El Faraa refugee camp. Thus far, Israeli forces have killed 51 Palestinians during Iron Wall, while losing three soldiers. Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams camps have seen the heaviest fighting, with the army destroying houses, tearing up roads and cutting water pipes to clear access routes. In these camps, Israeli forces have thus far arrested 365 Palestinians and forced some 40,000 people from their homes – the biggest displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank since the occupation began in 1967. In the words of Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz, the camps are now “empty of residents”. The displaced have been forced to either rent alternative accommodations or find shelter in neighbouring towns.
The Israeli operation in Jenin – a city supposed to be under the PA’s jurisdiction by the Oslo agreements’ terms – looks set to last for some time. On 23 February, Israel deployed tanks in Jenin, their first use in the West Bank since 2002. Katz instructed Israeli forces to “prepare for a prolonged presence in the cleared camps for the coming year and to prevent the return of residents and the resurgence of terrorism”. Meanwhile, numerous new checkpoints have sprouted across the West Bank, further restricting Palestinian movement that had already been massively curtailed in the aftermath of the 7 October 2023 attack. There are now a total of 925 checkpoints throughout the territory.
The UN has criticised Israel’s heavy-handed approach in Operation Iron Wall, saying its use of force is more suited to war than policing, while the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has talked of the “Gaza-fication” of the West Bank. Foreign security sources who work closely with the Israelis say Israel has relaxed the rules of engagement across the territory, noting that soldiers now make no practical distinction between armed militants and ordinary citizens participating in community defence. These sources also suggest that Israel considered the PA’s surrender program inadequate and that it would rather see Palestinian militants dead than imprison them.
The PA between a rock and a hard place
As these events unfold, the PA finds itself in a deepening quandary. Security cooperation with Israel has always been a key rationale for its existence, nudging it to assist the Israeli campaign, even as the destructive raids undercut its attempts to police the West Bank and to rebuild its own popular legitimacy.
Thus far, the PA seems to be sticking by its Israeli partner. Though details are unclear, Israel appears to be coordinating some of its Operation Iron Wall actions with the PA. Since the start of Iron Wall, PA security forces have arrested the alleged leader of the Jenin Brigades, Bassam al-Saadi, along with several unnamed activists throughout Jenin governorate. Clashes between PA forces and Palestinian fighters have also broken out in other West Bank towns, such as Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Hebron and Ramallah.
On 10 February, the PA crossed what many Palestinians regard as a red line. Acquiescing to longstanding demands from Israel and the U.S., the PA pared down payments to families of Palestinians in Israeli prisons or of those killed by Israeli forces. Israel had tagged these disbursements as “pay for slay” incentives, because some have gone to families of Palestinians who killed Israelis. Prisoners’ families will still get payments in regular instalments, irrespective of the crime of which their relative is accused. But the revised PA program is based on the needs of prisoners and their families, and it is aimed at the prisoners’ reintegration into society – it is, in effect, a social welfare initiative as opposed to one compensating people for being jailed by Israel. A Western diplomat with access to security files told Crisis Group that the PA’s total outlay for this program might go down by 15 per cent. Nonetheless, the PA’s decision has hurt its public standing.
The PA finds itself in a difficult spot, disempowered and yet still indispensable. Israel and its U.S. and other Western allies are all highly critical of it – as are Palestinians themselves, albeit for very different reasons. Yet no one sees a viable alternative. Israel needs the PA, at least in the short term, as it has neither the security nor the administrative structures at hand to replace the PA’s functions. One alternative to the PA would be a significant intervention by foreign states and aid agencies, with a concomitant increase in international scrutiny. But Israel would likely wish to avoid this scenario. The PA has also proven a useful straw man for Israel in its manoeuvring to avoid granting the Palestinians substantial concessions in negotiations toward a two-state solution or to mitigate the impact of settlement expansion and the violence of the occupation. Israel’s interest is thus to keep the PA weak and only minimally effective. The Trump administration may share this view, given its 90-day suspension of funding for the PA, including the security forces, with no guarantee of resuming payments. No other donor has offered to fill this void of $80 million in security assistance, creating an additional burden on the PA.
The larger dilemma
The situation in the West Bank crystallises the dilemma of the Palestinian national movement: cooperate with Israel at all costs – including, as the PA has discovered, the good-will of the population – or actively oppose the occupation, either through popular protest or armed confrontation. Abbas and his supporters consistently argue against a confrontational approach, claiming that violence in particular is too dangerous and could lead to catastrophic consequences for the Palestinians – as indeed it has in Gaza. Senior PA security officers say groups such as the Jenin Brigades unwittingly serve Israeli interests by providing justification for intensified military operations that aim, they believe, to weaken the PA and allow de facto annexation of the West Bank, particularly by making certain areas uninhabitable.
Abbas’s critics argue that he views the choice too starkly, seeing accommodation with Israel as the only viable path despite its diminishing returns. Many moderates in Fatah and other factions support a middle ground: discouraging armed militancy while encouraging active civic resistance and more proactively challenging Israel in international forums such as the UN than Abbas. The PA president has taken this last tack in the past to bolster his flagging popularity, only to back down when Israel has punished the PA by withholding tax revenues, revoking the free movement of senior PA officials and refusing to engage politically with the Palestinian leadership.
The critical problem the Palestinians and the PA face is negotiating constructively when the balance of power is so profoundly tilted against them – and when the Israeli state cannot be said to be acting in good faith. The promise of Oslo is now a distant memory. Blamed for not seizing opportunities for peace, Palestinians counter that there are now five times as many Israeli settlers in the West Bank as when the accord was signed in 1993; that Israel has backtracked on or failed to abide by numerous agreements, from Oslo itself to the U.S.-sponsored 2003 roadmap to peace to the 2023 Aqaba summit communiqué; and that it has failed to restrain both its army and violent settlers.
Palestinians see that cooperation with Israel has delivered neither a path to statehood nor prevented a significant deterioration in the security of their persons and property, and in every other aspect of their lives and livelihoods. Doubling down on a failing strategy makes no sense to anyone but the most dedicated Abbas supporters, whose number includes several who have benefited financially from the occupation. “The Palestinian security forces treat us as outlaws,” a member of the Jenin Brigades noted, “but they fail to understand that this [resistance] is a national phenomenon arising from a lack of political alternatives and prospects for the future”.
Palestinians who have taken the lead in organised armed resistance argue that it represents their only viable option for maintaining their national struggle, despite recognising that it is unlikely to advance their cause. They point to the failure of all other approaches, and they argue that armed struggle at least extracts a tangible cost from Israel for sustaining the occupation, rather than allowing it to continue with impunity. Such resistance may cost their own people more, in lives and destroyed neighbourhoods, but they say the Palestinians will likely pay this price, anyway, just over a longer timeframe. Israel has pushed Palestinians onto what they call “death ground”, pushing them to fight back no matter what the consequences.
Palestinians who do turn to violence tend to see it as a way to reaffirm their presence on their land and to inflict a cost on the occupier. This response – though lacking cohesive organisation, a coherent vision or leadership – emerges from profound desperation rather than mere nihilism. Regardless of how it is characterised, this pattern is deeply rooted and unlikely to disappear anytime soon. The trajectory of confrontation in the West Bank is not easy to predict, but the conditions driving it are set to persist, making further escalation a likely outcome.
Tahani Mustafa – Senior ICG Analyst, Palestine
