“I have never seen the Palestinian Authority in a worse situation,” US Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israel and Palestinian Affairs Hady Amr told Israeli officials, according to a Thursday report by the Axios news site.
The PA’s crisis is multifaceted: At the economic level, it has suffered significantly as a result of the ongoing pandemic. It has also seen Israel withhold hundreds of millions of shekels in tax revenues on an annual basis since 2019 in order to offset funds that Ramallah pays to terrorists and their families.
The PA also faces a legitimacy crisis at the political level after its President Mahmoud Abbas made the decision in April to indefinitely postpone the first parliamentary election in nearly 15 years. The PA leader said the decision was due to Israel’s refusal to allow balloting in East Jerusalem, but most observers charged that Abbas feared an embarrassing loss to his rivals in Hamas and within his own Fatah party.
To make matters worse, the PA became the target of international uproar after a prominent Palestinian activist, Nizar Banat, was killed last month while in PA custody. The death sparked protests throughout the West Bank, against which Abbas’s security forces clamped down harshly, leading to further demands for explanations from the US and other countries around the world.
Amr met with Abbas, PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh and other senior Palestinian officials in Ramallah as well as Israeli officials in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv while in the region this week. READ MORE
