Lisa Goldman
New Lines Magazine / August 20, 2026
The Palestinian politician has emerged as a major power broker who has the ear of the most senior people in the UAE, the US and Israel.
Early this year, Mohammed Dahlan, who was the de facto ruler of Gaza during the heyday of the Oslo period, held a closed-door, off-the-record meeting with a group of Middle East experts in a European city. According to people who were present, the subject of Gaza’s future dominated the conversation. So, too, did the subject of Dahlan’s future in Palestinian Authority politics.
Dahlan is an adviser to Mohamed bin Zayed, the powerful ruler of Abu Dhabi and president of the United Arab Emirates. His name crops up frequently in media reports as a power broker who triangulates between the Israeli government, senior figures in the Donald Trump administration, and the UAE. For years, senior people in the Israeli and U.S. intelligence services have put forward his name as a possible successor to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is 90 years old. Lately, the same sources have suggested he is the man who could take over governance of Gaza.
In recent months, Dahlan has met several times with Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy, and with Jared Kushner, the president’s increasingly powerful son-in-law. People at the closed meeting in Europe said Dahlan spoke extensively about his excellent relationship with Witkoff and Kushner, praising them repeatedly, while he disparaged Abbas.
In late May, the Israeli media trumpeted a meeting in Abu Dhabi between Dahlan and David Zini, the head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service. Dahlan has met senior Israeli intelligence officers many times, but this meeting seemed noteworthy because Zini was appointed to the job in October 2025 under a cloud of controversy. A religious nationalist settler with 11 children, he is notorious for his far-right views and his messianism, has no intelligence experience and does not speak Arabic, which was once considered a requirement for the job. The Israeli media has posited that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose Zini solely for his loyalty. There was no readout on the discussion between Zini and Dahlan, nor did the Israeli media offer any follow-up or commentary beyond reporting the fact that they met. One can only speculate that the situation in Gaza was on the agenda.
According to one of the people who attended the meeting in Europe last winter, Dahlan said explicitly that he was not interested in returning to politics. Another attendee said that Dahlan would probably see governing Gaza or heading the PA as a serious step down from his current status as a wealthy freelance power broker with direct access to the most senior people in the intelligence services, to heads of state and top-level diplomats.
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is acute. According to a United Nations report released in February, the Israeli military destroyed more than 90% of the territory’s housing and most of its infrastructure. The scale of destruction is “unprecedented” and the suffering of the people on the ground “impossible to describe in words alone.” But the question of rehabilitating Gaza is stuck on several issues, not least Israel’s adamant refusal to withdraw its military, per Trump’s 15-point peace plan, while Hamas remains in power. Trump is reportedly frustrated by Netanyahu’s intransigence on this point. In the search for a solution, Israel and the U.S. have suggested that Dahlan is the man who could fill the power vacuum in Gaza.
According to Michael Milshtein, the former head of the Department for Palestinian Affairs in Israeli Military Intelligence, the idea that Dahlan could return to leadership in Gaza is an Israeli “fantasy” based on “hollow ideas” that do not reflect reality or take the wishes of Palestinians into account. Dahlan is deeply unpopular among Palestinians, he told me.
Milshtein, a frequent guest on the Haaretz news podcast who now heads Palestine Studies at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center, decried the Israeli leadership’s inability to learn any lessons from past failures. Clearly, the years of pitting Hamas and Fatah against one another, in a dubious strategy of divide and conquer, had produced nothing positive. Israel simply refused to accept, he said, that there is no viable alternative to the PA, which he described as “the least worst alternative” to Hamas.
Milshtein said that Israel sees Dahlan as the means of undermining Abbas, whom they dislike, viewing him as a rigid Palestinian nationalist and ideologue. The UAE, said Milshtein, shares Israel’s antipathy toward Abbas, but for different reasons. They view the Palestinian president as deeply corrupt, which is one of the reasons they support Dahlan. A well-connected Emirati businessperson confirmed that the UAE leadership “hates” Abbas for his corruption, which reportedly involves the PA leader pocketing Emirati funds that were earmarked for Palestinian aid. The UAE also seeks to push Qatari influence out of Gaza, because they see Qatar as supportive of Islamists. This is another reason to put Dahlan forward as a leader — if not of Gaza, then at least on the issue of Gaza.
In a previous life, Dahlan, who is 64, was head of Gaza’s Preventive Security Force, a position to which Yasser Arafat appointed him in 1994. As the de facto ruler of the territory, Dahlan became known as the strongman of Gaza, which was sometimes referred to as Dahlanistan. He acquired a nasty reputation for fiscal corruption and violent repression, including directing his security forces to carry out assassinations, arbitrary detentions and torture of Islamists. During a 2005 reporting trip to Gaza, a Palestinian colleague told me that Dahlan’s security forces would arbitrarily stop people driving luxury cars and confiscate them, leaving the driver and passengers on the side of the road. I don’t know how true this or similar anecdotes are. But that was the widespread perception of the man and his leadership, even among those who abhorred Hamas, as my colleague did.
Dahlan grew up in the impoverished refugee camp of Khan Younis in southern Gaza. During the 1980s, he became involved in militant activity and spent significant time in Israeli jails, where he learned to speak Hebrew fluently. He is also widely reported to have built strong relationships with CIA and Shin Bet sources over the years, particularly during the period when he controlled Gaza.
In 2006, after a brief armed struggle, Hamas ousted the Fatah leadership from Gaza, and Dahlan was exiled. He went initially to Ramallah, but later, after a public rift with Abbas, fled the West Bank to avoid imprisonment in a PA jail. A few years later, Dahlan resurfaced as the wealthy, urbane special adviser to Bin Zayed. Now he is a major international power broker.
There’s no official account of how Dahlan arrived at his powerful position in the UAE, which is why journalists often use terms like “mysterious” and “murky” to describe him. He is handsome and dresses elegantly; those who have met him describe him as charismatic and say he seems to enjoy cultivating an aura of mystery.
But one of the people at the meeting in Europe saw Dahlan’s charisma morph in a split second into menace. Another person present, he told me, asked Dahlan a question that brought up the less savoury aspects of his background. This person addressed Dahlan in Arabic. Instead of answering the question, he said, Dahlan stopped smiling, leaned forward and asked, in a threatening tone: “Shu ismak?” (“What’s your name?”)
Dahlan, said this person, “radiates sleaziness and bravado.” He described the Palestinian power broker as a “scary guy” who “tried to come across as a serious person but couldn’t hide his thuggery.” For people who like thugs they think they can manage — people like Trump, for example — one can see Dahlan’s appeal.
The problem for those who know Dahlan well and fear his influence is that he now has plenty of it. He has become “the only guy who can actually get anything into Gaza,” said one Palestinian analyst. He added that Dahlan was leveraging his high-level influence and access to funds from the U.S., via the UAE, to get desperately needed supplies into the pulverized territory. Mohammed Daraghmeh, a veteran Palestinian journalist who is West Bank bureau chief for Asharq News, told Le Monde that Dahlan “gets things done” for Gaza. Given the desperate situation there, people are of course grateful. And gratitude can be leveraged into support.
Dahlan, said the person who was at the meeting in Europe, is “positioning himself as a grand facilitator” who interprets the Emiratis for Israel and brokers between Hamas and Fatah. He is also rapidly acquiring influence in Palestine. “I don’t think people understand how big a hand Dahlan has in the West Bank and Gaza,” he said. “His name is on everyone’s lips.”
Last week, Dahlan met in Cairo with members of various factions across the Palestinian political spectrum, including Hamas, with whom he has reached a rapprochement since Israel launched its catastrophically destructive post-Oct. 7 war on Gaza. The purpose of the Cairo meeting was to discuss political coalitions ahead of the legislative elections that Abbas has scheduled for Nov. 28. But Dahlan has not indicated that he has changed his mind about seeking an elected position in the PA. So what’s his goal? “Your guess is as good as mine,” said the person who recounted Dahlan’s menacing words at the meeting in Europe.
“I don’t know what the hell is going on with this dude.”
Lisa Goldman is Europe Editor at New Lines Magazine
