WEST BANK (Dispatches) – The Zionist regime is helping Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces crackdown on Palestinian factions in the occupied West Bank, an Israeli journalist has revealed.
Speaking to public broadcaster Kan, journalist and specialist in Palestinian affairs Gal Berger said, “Israel hurried to help the PA because it is unable to deal with Hamas.”
Berger claimed that the resistance movement “has recently raised its head in the West Bank.”
As part of the Zionist assistance to the PA, Berger said, occupying troops arrested Hassan Yousef, senior Hamas leader in the West Bank.
This came two days after a report published by Safa, local Palestinian news agency, revealing that PA President Mahmoud Abbas had prepared a plan to crack down on Palestinian factions in order to open discussions with Zionist war minister Benny Gantz soon.
Last week, the regime’s so-called regional cooperation minister Issawi Frej told Israeli Channel 12 news that he and Gantz were planning to meet Abbas very soon in order to “strengthen” the PA and “calm tensions” that have resulted in “a wave of terror attacks.”
This came in light of a fierce PA campaign against Palestinian factions that included detentions, dispersal of gatherings and confiscation of flags.
On Thursday, PA security officers raided the town of Tammun in the Jenin and confiscated Islamic Jihad banners during a reception held for Azmi Bani Odeh, a local resident who had just been released from the occupying regime’s prison.
In another development, Hamas officials buried three of their members Tuesday who were killed by gunfire in a tense Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon days earlier. The resistance movement accused members of a rival faction of the deadly shooting.
Ayman Shanaa, an official with the movement, told mourners that Fatah militia members were behind the shootings, which he called a “heinous and cowardly crime.”
There are tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees and their descendants in Lebanon, most living in refugee camps. Fatah is the political faction of Abbas and Hamas rules the Gaza Strip.
The deadly violence took place at a Hamas-organized funeral Sunday in the Burj Shamali camp. Shanaa called it “a premeditated crime” that aims to undermine security and stability in the refugee camps in Lebanon.
The funeral was held in the southern city of Sidon and attended by several thousand people, many of whom raised the green Hamas flag.