How the Deaths of Three Terrorists Help Mahmoud Abbas

On Tuesday, the IDF and Shin Bet killed three wanted terrorists in a shoot-out in Nablus. The story has shifted Palestinian attention away from a meeting of the PLO central committee earlier this week, which was widely seen as a power-grab by the aging Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party. And it benefits Abbas in other ways as well, as Khaled Abu Toameh explains:

[T]hat the three militants belonged to Fatah’s armed wing, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, allows the faction to boast that its members, and not only Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, are involved in military action against Israel.

The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades were quick to publish a statement endorsing the three slain gunmen as its “martyrs.” The statement aims to send a message to the Palestinian public that Fatah remains committed to the “armed struggle” against Israel despite its leaders’ talk about the need for a peaceful “popular resistance.” This is Fatah’s way of scoring points with a disillusioned Palestinian public.

[Moreover], the Nablus incident allows the PA leadership to continue its campaign of incitement against Israel and urge the international community to exert pressure on it.

On the other hand, the incident in Nablus is a sign of the huge challenges facing the PA and its security forces. The presence of various armed groups on the streets of major Palestinian cities is seen by many Palestinians as a sign of the PA’s failure to enforce law and order and to rein in the militias, most of which are affiliated with Fatah and feuding clans.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian terror

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF