'The Palestinian Authority's Security Forces are fundamentally involved in terror'
By Adam Eliyahu BerkowitzPublished March 4, 2024 at 12:39pm
Joe Biden holds a Cabinet meeting, Monday, Oct. 2, 2023, in the Cabinet Room of the White House. Secretary of State Antony Blinken attends. (Official White House photo by Adam Schultz)
ISRAEL – It's happening with increasing frequency.
A terrorist opened fire at a gas station in Samaria near the town of Eli on Thursday afternoon, killing two Israelis.
The victims were Rabbi Yitzhak Zeiger, a 57-year-old father of three and a resident of Shavei Shomron, and Uria Hartum, a 16-year-old high school student from the town of Dolev, who had been hitching a ride with Zeiger.
Zeiger was filling his car with gasoline when he was attacked and attempted to return fire when he was killed.
Hartum was shot as he sat inside the car. The Palestinian gunman was shot by the owner of a hummus restaurant located in the gas station.
The Shin Bet security agency identified the terrorist as Muhammad Manasra, age 31, a major in the Palestinian Authority's police's criminal investigation division.
He lived in Qalandiya near Jerusalem.
The Shin Bet also reported that Mansara was incarcerated in an Israeli prison between 2018 and 2019 for weapons offenses. Palestinian sources reported that Manasra was a graduate of the Egyptian Police College.
The IDF began mapping Manasra's home ahead of its expected demolition.
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The attack was the second deadly attack that took place at the location since June when a Palestinian terrorist murdered four Israelis.
The attack, carried out by a PA policeman, raises concerns about U.S. funding.
The State Department has reportedly spent more than $170 million supporting the PA security forces since 2007.
Last year, Secretary of State Antony Blinken initiated a plan to train 5,000 Palestinian policemen in counterterrorism and commando tactics.
At the end of the training, the Palestinian officers returned home to Palestinian cities and towns inside Samaria and in the areas surrounding Hebron with 5,000 rifles and additional "anti-terror equipment."
There have been rising concerns about Palestinian Authority police carrying out attacks against Israelis. WND recently featured a story on the issue, citing a report in Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), an Israeli watchdog group.
PMW discovered social media posts and broadcasts produced by Fatah, the ruling party in the West Bank, praising dozens of members of the Palestinian Authority security forces for having attacked Israelis with slogans like, "By day Security Forces, and by night self-sacrificing fighters."
Fatah boasted that:
* "More than 1,500 military operations (i.e., terror attacks) against the Israeli occupation were led by the Fatah Movement members and the [PA] Security Forces members [in 2023]."
* "More than roughly 63-65% of the number of 'martyrs' in the West Bank, in the daily confrontations, are members of the Fatah Movement.
And most of them are members of the [PA] Security Forces or their sons."
"The Palestinian Authority's Security Forces are fundamentally involved in terror," PMW concluded:.
Their terror involvement is not condemned by the PA or Fatah, but rather glorified. The terror involvement is not presented by the PA and Fatah as unfortunate exceptions, but rather as the heroic norm. The officers involved are not ostracized, but rather are honored and given military funerals. With Fatah and the PA Security Forces so deeply involved in terror in the West Bank, the British and American suggestion of empowering them to rule Gaza after Israel has destroyed the terror infrastructures is inconceivable to Israelis. The military force that rules Gaza after the war cannot be fundamentally involved in terror, or else the entire costly operation to destroy the terror infrastructure will have been in vain.
The program, originally set up by President George W. Bush, trained several thousand Palestinians in four-month courses at a facility in Jordan used by U.S.-backed Iraqi forces.
The program was aimed at establishing a force of nearly 50,000 trained Palestinian soldiers. None of the instructors were U.S. government personnel.
Previous courses focused on crowd control and equipped the PA forces with non-lethal equipment. Last year's course armed the PA policemen with firearms and ammunition, and the training to use them effectively.
Indeed, soon after the course ended, the PA encountered financial straits and PA policemen resorted to selling their ammunition and weapons.
Ironically, Gen. Tawfiq Tirawi, a Fatah official who served as the Head of Palestinian Authority Intelligence, stated explicitly in a 2020 speech that terrorists themselves are part of the Palestinian Authority's security establishment and should therefore be left alone by PA security officers.
"These fighters [terrorists], who are part of the PA and the security establishment – their first obligation is to pursue the collaborators [with Israel] and real estate agents [who sell land to Jews] and not to pursue any fighter!"
Tirawi said. "This is the obligation they know and must know! These fighters are your brothers, and they constitute support for you, so be on their side."
This major flaw in the program was documented by journalist Caroline Glick in an article in the Jewish News Syndicate, or JNS.
"During the course of the Palestinian terror war 20 years ago, U.S.-trained P.A. forces murdered 26 IDF soldiers in 2002 alone," Glick wrote.
"The Palestinians learned how to use cell phones as remote detonation devices from their American trainers.
Over the years, they have put that knowledge to use, not to fight terror, but to kill Israelis in terrorist attacks.
"The P.A., whose forces the U.S. seeks to 'empower,' is controlled by the Fatah terror group. P.A. chairman Mahmoud Abbas is the chairman of Fatah.
Fatah terrorists carried out most of the murderous terror attacks in 2021-2022. Several of those attacks were carried out by P.A. security officers."
The new force was intended to combat newly formed terrorist organizations in Shechem (Nablus) and Jenin that challenged the PA leadership and President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah faction.
The plan was for the new army to fight terrorism inside the areas of Judea and Samaria that are under supervision of the PA, while Israel was told by the U.S. to curtail its activities in these areas.
Underlying all this is the fact that the Palestinian Authority is an essential element of the "Two-State Solution" agenda being advanced by the Biden administration.
The "Two-State Solution" would create an unprecedented Arab state within the boundaries of Israel that has been ethnically cleansed of Jews.
Its capital would be in Jerusalem and the holy sites that are in the eastern section, including the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, would become exclusively Muslim.
While the Biden administration supports the Palestinian Authority, recent polling shows that this ultimate outcome is unlikely.
A poll conducted by the Ramallah-based Arab World for Research and Development in November 2023 found that 85% of Palestinians in the West Bank have a "somewhat negative" or "very negative" view of the PA.
Seventy percent feel the same way about Abbas's ruling Fatah party.
Another poll by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in December 2023 found that a stunning 92% of Palestinians in the West Bank want Abbas to resign.
After Israel disengaged from Gaza almost two decades ago and evacuated the Jewish residents of Gush Katif, an election was held and Hamas emerged as the ruling party.
The terrorist organization then proceeded to eliminate and kill all of the supporters of Fatah remaining in Gaza.
It seems likely that if the Biden administration forces Israel to create a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, Hamas will quickly take control of it, just as it did in Gaza in 2006.
This played out last week when the Biden administration pressured Abbas to make changes in the Palestinian Authority in order to enable it to take a greater role in ruling postwar Gaza.
Rather than strengthen the PA, however, this led PA Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh and his government to submit their resignations on Monday.
This week, PA Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki has already told Western media that Hamas would not be part of any newly formed "unity" government.
"The time now is not for a government where Hamas will be part of it, because, in this case, then it will be boycotted by a number of countries, as happened before," he told the U.N. correspondents' association.
"We don't want to be in a situation like that. We want to be accepted and engage fully with the international community," he explained.
Despite his assurances, representatives of both Hamas and Fatah met in Moscow on Thursday at Russia-hosted talks to discuss "unity of action" against Israel.
All this comes amid alarming reports that the Biden administration will recognize an independent Palestinian state after the war against Hamas ends, effectively attempting to impose an unnegotiated Two-State Solution on Israel.
The new Palestinian state would be led by the PA and Mahmoud Abbas who, ironically, is currently in his 18th year of a four-year term as president.
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