Despite numerous efforts, backed by Egypt and other regional powers, the Palestinian Authority (PA), which governs parts of the West Bank, and Hamas, which governs Gaza, have been unable to come to any sort of mutual understanding. Meanwhile, writes Ehud Yaari, Jerusalem seems close to arriving at a long-term cease-fire with Hamas, even as the PA president Mahmoud Abbas is making ever-more-persistent threats to end relations with Israel. Yaari explains Hamas’s motivations:

Last Friday, the Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz announced the designation of six Palestinian organizations as terrorist groups due to their deep entanglements with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which has been committing murderous attacks since 1968. Both the EU and several European states have provided funds to the recently proscribed organizations. A decade ago, pro-Israel activists even supplied the European Union with information, for a long time ignored, about the links between these groups and the PFLP. Members of one group—the Union of Agricultural Work Committees—murdered the seventeen-year-old Rina Shnerb in 2019. Jonathan Tobin writes: