Despite the continuous security coordination between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Israeli occupation, the PA has toned down its security campaigns against Palestinians who fight the Israeli occupation in the occupied West Bank to the extent that a lot of people thought the internal division between Fatah and Hamas had ended.
However, over the past few months, the PA has scaled up its campaigns against Palestinians who are fighting the Israeli occupation. It has resumed the policy of political detentions, which targets the Palestinian who are fighting the Israeli occupation regardless of their political affiliations.
“These days, when the soil of our country is coloured by martyrs’ blood, and amidst an atmosphere of national unity, the Palestinian Authority insists on reinforcing the political division through a detention campaign,” member of the Committee for Prisoners’ Families in the West Bank, Osama Abu Eida, said.
According to the committee, the PA detained and summoned 142 Palestinians due to their anti-Israeli occupation stances over the past week. At the same time, a number of prisoners saw their detention renewed, houses were raided and women incarcerated.
Since the start of 2022, Lawyers for Justice has recorded 500 political detentions by the PA’s security services on the grounds of political affiliation and anti-Israeli occupation stances. At the same time, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights has called for the PA to stop its detentions on the grounds of resistance actions in the occupied West Bank.
“We condemn the political detention campaign carried out by the PA in the occupied West Bank,” the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights said. “The file of political detentions must be closed for ever,” the rights centre said, noting that the political detainees in the prisons of the PA in the occupied West Bank are subjected to torture, including being beaten with batons or being administered with electrical shocks.
Ahmad Hrish, who was recently released from the PA’s prisons, told Quds News Network that he planned to commit suicide to evade torture inside the PA’s prisons. He said that he was questioned by PA interrogators about his anti-occupation action.
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In Hebron, the PA security services raided the Karama family home in Hebron and detained seven people from the same family after harshly beating them. Two of them were admitted to hospital due to the abuse they suffered, Quds News Network reported.
“We are addressing the PA and saying that this is not your role,” Abu Eida said.
Meanwhile, the PA has detained several members of the new resistance movement the Lions’ Den.
The PA leadership, led by the secular fatah movement, has clearly insisted on maintaining the security coordination with the Israeli occupation. In addition to the regular meetings between senior officials from both sides, the PA leadership has said it is worried about the possibility that the Palestinian factions from Gaza are running the anti-occupation activities in the occupied West Bank.
It is bragging about its action against the Palestinian resistance and against any Palestinian who discloses the outcomes of its security coordination with the Israeli occupation as happened with activist Nizar Banat, whose was beaten to death by the PA security services during a raid on his house in June 2021.
The PA continues to raid universities and schools to detain students who support the Palestinian resistance and praise its actions against the Israeli occupation. This has been recently seen at Al-Najah University, Birzeit University and others with the PA summoning, interrogating and detaining students as a result of their pro-resistance activities.
At the same time, the PA leadership and Fatah calls for maintaining national unity and for Hamas to hand over governance of the Gaza Strip to the PA. Such calls are only being made for political and media consumption.
The agreement signed in Algeria in October for Palestinian reconciliation was a means to whitewash the crimes of the PA.
It has become clear to everyone who has knowledge of the Palestinian issue that there is no Palestinian national division, just Palestinians who are working for and with the Israeli occupation and those who are working to end it.
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