Khalil, a shy 21-year-old whose name has been changed, was arrested in a pre-dawn raid last October for his allegiance to Hamas. But when Israeli forces smashed through the door of his family home, they didn’t tell him why they were detaining him. He was imprisoned for six months without charge, in conditions he described as “unbelievable”.
“The Israelis are trying to restrain and terrorise us using these methods,” he said. “People are afraid. There is no freedom of speech … I’m scared to travel to any of the cities in the West Bank in case I get detained. Still, it feels like they could raid my house at any minute.”
But as Israeli forces continue to pummel Gaza, claiming to be targeting the remaining Hamas brigades, they have also swept up thousands of Palestinians in raids in the West Bank. The majority, according to the Palestinian prisoners’ commission, are not aligned to Hamas. Even so, the raids and an increasing number of settler attacks have succeeded in creating a climate of fear that is undermining Hamas’s rivals Fatah, who operate the ruling Palestinian Authority, highlighting its inability to protect Palestinians and quietly fuelling Hamas’s popularity.
“These raids are generating distrust towards the Palestinian Authority but also fear of attack by them – they can’t protect us but at the same time they could attack us too,” said Khalil, pointing to the authority’s history of detaining members of Hamas in the West Bank.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Hamas-backed bloc at Birzeit has swept the annual student elections in recent years, in a victory often regarded as a rare democratic bellwether for the entire West Bank.
But now fear of arrest, or in some cases rearrest, has smothered many open expressions of politics across the West Bank, where even casual discussions of support for Hamas can mean risking detention.
Qadura Fares, a longtime party grandee from Fatah who heads the authority’s prisoners and ex-prisoners commission, fretted that their perceived failures had emboldened their rivals.
Al Mughayyir, he added, is a place where Fatah traditionally counts on a large pool of support, but he feared rising settler attacks, sometimes witnessed or even joined by Israeli soliders, were undermining the authority’s policy security cooperation with Israel, and the body itself.
Fares described attending political gatherings in Ramallah, the de-facto capital of the Palestinian Authority, where he was surprised to hear secular and Christian participants expressing support for Hamas.
At the heart of Fares’s concerns was that Fatah’s decision three decades ago to enter into peace negotiations with Israel had ultimately done little to help the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank.
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