In a bid to undermine resistance groups in the occupied West Bank, Israel is strategically targeting key individuals to incite discord between armed factions and the Palestinian Authority, intensifying an already volatile situation marked by unprecedented violence and political maneuvering.
After failing to destroy resistance factions in the occupied West Bank, The Cradle has learned that Israeli forces plan to target specific individuals to create tensions between the armed groups and the Palestinian Authority (PA).
This effort includes an alleged meeting held in Tel Aviv between Hussein al-Sheikh, head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) ’s executive committee, and Major General Ghasan Alyan, head of Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT).
The Tel Aviv trip by Sheikh, the man favored by Israel to lead the PA once President Mahmoud Abbas retires, was organized to discuss methods of “de-escalating tensions and allowing West Bank workers to travel into Israeli territory for work,” according to an anonymous source in his office.
The rise of West Bank resistance
Over 530 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank since 7 October, making the past eight months the most violent period there since the Second Intifada. Although the Hamas-led Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was formally staged in the Gaza Strip, the fighting in the northern West Bank has now coalesced into what can be called a second Palestinian front against the Israeli military.
Since the start of the war in Gaza, there have also been quantitative jumps in the complexity of ambushes and the effectiveness of explosive charges manufactured by resistance groups in the West Bank.
Many of the West Bank’s armed resistance groups, as we know them today, formed in the wake of the events of May 2021, when Hamas led its 11-day ’Sword of Jerusalem’ battle against the Israeli military. Simultaneously, the concept of the ‘Unity of Fronts,’ or ‘Unity of the Squares,’ emerged in defense of Al-Aqsa Mosque across occupied Palestine, and the ‘Joint Operations Room of Resistance Factions’ was established.
Initially consisting of only a few dozen young armed men from the Jenin Refugee Camp, by September of that year, a group organized by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)’s armed wing, the Quds Brigades, would officially declare themselves the Jenin Brigade.
What was interesting about the Jenin Brigade was that despite being led by PIJ, it also included members from the Fatah-aligned Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, along with members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), and Hamas armed wings.
Israel’s knee-jerk response was to raid Jenin and kill both fighters and civilians, triggering conflict even more broadly. In February 2022, Israeli special forces carried out a reckless daytime assassination of three Palestinians traveling in a civilian car in Nablus, who were later identified as members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
On 31 March 2022, after several “lone-wolf” attacks against Israelis that left 19 dead, the military announced “Operation Break the Wave” in the West Bank. This operation would begin with arrest campaigns, focusing clearly on the areas where the newly formed resistance groups emerged, which had begun expanding beyond the area of Jenin by that time.
The operation, formulated from an earlier Israeli strategy to combat hundreds of lone-wolf attacks between October 2015 and early 2016, inflicted mass civilian casualties and only succeeded at encouraging the growth of the armed resistance groups.
According to local Nablus-based journalist Ahmad al-Bazz, the Israeli military’s violence played a large role in fueling armed struggle in his city and would later give birth to the Lions’ Den armed faction, formally announced in the Old City of Nablus in October 2022.
Another influencing factor was the assassination of 19-year-old Ibrahim Nabulsi, who valiantly fought to the death when cornered by an Israeli special forces team that August.
In early 2023, when it had become apparent that Palestinian armed resistance groups were effectively taking control of areas like the Jenin Refugee Camp and the Old City of Nablus, US security coordinator Michael Fenzel proposed a “security plan” to the PA.
The proposal, dubbed the “Fenzel Plan,” was reportedly accepted by the PA and included the US-backed formation of a special PA force to counter the armed groups and retake security control in the northern West Bank.
Israel’s divide and rule strategy
While this was underway, Tel Aviv was already working on implementing its own divide-and-rule strategy to sow chaos between Palestinians in the West Bank. Younis Tirawi, a reporter known on social media for his intimate knowledge of the PA and Palestinian armed groups in the West Bank, tells The Cradle that Israel had already begun arresting PA officers involved with the resistance back in November 2022.
Then, in the summertime [2023], they arrested a Palestinian intelligence officer who was coordinating on the ground between the PIJ and Fatah groups.
According to two PA sources who wish to remain unnamed, the Fenzel Plan has now been effectively forgotten and won’t proceed, allegedly due to the Ramallah-based PA’s strained relationship with Washington.
Although it is impossible to confirm whether this information is fully accurate, there have been no known developments regarding the creation of a PA-specialized anti-resistance force.
The PA’s complicated relationship with the resistance
The Palestinian resistance groups in the West Bank may fight under the same banners in many cases but have varying relations and predicaments with the PA throughout the territory. In Jenin, for instance, many of the fighters belonging to Jenin Brigade were the sons of high-ranking PA-linked figures, like Fathi Khazem, while many others were actually PA Security Force (PASF) officers who had chosen the path of armed resistance.
In early 2023, the interconnectivity between the PASF and Jenin Brigade was such that a direct line of communication via handheld radios allowed for continuous coordination when needed. It appears the Israelis caught on to this and cracked down, as the obvious ties between the resistance and local PA forces made it difficult to characterize the fighters as bandits or outlaws seeking to violently challenge the PA’s security control. As Tirawi describes the scene at the time:
During the second invasion of Jenin, after the beginning of the Gaza war, they arrested all the Fatah members who were dual fighters and [PA] security officers who were not going to work, and people who were part of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. That was the main point when they began arresting senior figures coordinating between armed groups and the Palestinian Authority. There is always going to be tensions in any place or any city where there are [two armed forces] because you are taking away the Palestinian Authority’s influence and their ability to enforce the law in the area.
Tirawi gives the example of the Tulkarem Brigade, which finds itself in a different predicament than Jenin and operates in an area with greater tensions with the PA. He explained that fighters often conceal their identities, and the PA forces there cannot distinguish between fighters and criminal elements.
This is especially the case, he says, when it comes to issues of weapons transfers into the city, and can often cause confusion in a setting where the PASF is tasked with managing security there.
There are, however, blatant examples, especially in Tulkarem, of PA forces outrageously opening fire upon resistance fighters and confiscating their weapons from them.
A source from Tulkarem, speaking with The Cradle on the condition of anonymity, reveals that the financing and ammunition that supplies Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades there reach these fighters through the PIJ’s armed wing in the city.
This information matched what local journalists from Nablus and Tulkarem had also come to understand, further demonstrating the interconnectivity between the resistance factions.
PA’s stance on PIJ and Hamas
Last year, a group emerged from Tulkarem’s Nour Shams refugee camp, calling itself Jund Allah and stating it was independent of any political party. However, after a number of their fighters were killed during Israeli incursions into the camp, this group later evolved into a small Qassam Brigades (armed wing of Hamas) aligned group.
While the PA will allow PIJ-aligned fighters to exist, they have little tolerance for anyone belonging to Hamas. According to the same source, once it was understood that the PIJ was aiding Hamas-aligned fighters in Tulkarem, this caused further friction with the PA.
On 6 November, Israel decided to assassinate the 24-year-old leader of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Tulkarem, named Jihad Ishhadeh, whose father is a Brigadier General in the PA’s security forces and is known to be friendly toward PA President Mahmoud Abbas. This is again an example of the Israeli occupation forces specifically going after fighters who maintain strong connections with the ruling PA.
The Nablus Equation
When the group known as the Lions’ Den emerged from the Old City of Nablus, it was a major cause for concern in both the PA and Israeli security establishments. Having witnessed the power that the Jenin Brigade had generated and the fact that they were able to openly hold military parades in Jenin City, the fear arose that this could soon be the case in Nablus and that it could lead to resistance fighters emulating this model in other cities too.
Nablus, unlike Jenin, is surrounded by Israeli settlements and military sites that are more open to armed attacks. The Lions’ Den emerged as a group that managed to command enormous support throughout occupied Palestine and even into the refugee camps in Lebanon. Formed of young fighters from a range of Palestinian factions, it formed alliances with other resistance groups in the surrounding refugee camps, like Balata camp.
It didn’t take the Israeli military long to begin carrying out assassinations and large-scale attacks in attempts to break up the Lions’ Den. For instance, Tamir al-Kilani, one of the founding members of the Lions’ Den and a member of the PFLP’s armed wing, the Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, was murdered in an Israeli booby-trapped motorbike explosion.
Many of the Lions’ Den’s leading members, affiliated with the PIJ movement, were also killed during various invasions of Nablus, while the PA arrested and imprisoned Musab Shtayyeh, the most prominent Hamas member who helped lead the group.
This left a much less diverse crowd of fighters to lead the Lions’ Den, who were commanded by Oday al-Azizi. Unlike Hamas members, some Fatah-affiliated fighters are given the option to remain under PA detention temporarily, avoiding assassination and arrest by the Israeli occupation forces.
Azizi, who is married to a woman from a prominent family loyal to PA President Abbas, is also a PA security officer himself and has worked to manage the relationship between the PA and the Lions’ Den for some time.
However, the Lions’ Den gradually saw its power decline and was left isolated due to its difficult predicament. The US Biden administration has just recently targeted the group with sanctions for its participation in armed activities in the West Bank, but it now plays a marginal role, if any.
While Tirawi informs The Cradle that “it is already over … the main structure has been dismantled,” two anonymous sources affiliated with West Bank resistance groups say that it has reduced in power and is not really present, as other armed groups are currently resisting Israeli incursions into Nablus instead of it.
Despite Israeli attempts to disband the resistance groups throughout the West Bank and to sever their ties to local PA elements to encourage internecine fighting, the groups persist.
Whether they will expand their operations in the near future is contingent on their ability to navigate their way through a complicated environment, evading persecution from the PASF and the Israeli military while implementing more sophisticated tactics and developing greater weapons capabilities.
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