Efforts to achieve reconciliation between the two largest Palestinian factions, which had been accelerating in recent days, may again be at risk of faltering. Hamas had made a series of goodwill gestures toward its Fatah rivals in recent days, and Fatah officials had announced that they would be traveling to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip for reconciliation talks. Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces in the Fatah-controlled West Bank subsequently arrested scores of Hamas members in the Fatah-controlled West Bank, causing Hamas to cancel planned celebrations in the area.
Hamas Spokesman Husam Badran said in a statement that PA security forces arrested 20 Hamas members within 24 hours, including members of the planning committee for the celebration, students at al-Najah University, and recently freed prisoners. Bardran said the arrests would not discourage the Hamas movement.
It is unclear how the incident will effect unity efforts, which Hamas is widely thought to badly need. The two factions have been openly at odds since at least 2007, when Hamas fighters violently seized Gaza’s government institutions from Fatah officials, expelling and killing many Fatah-linked figures in the process. Rapprochement talks since then have consistently failed, in no small part because of ongoing enmity and distrust between members on both sides. Unity efforts have also been complicated by Hamas’s continued commitment to the eradication of Israel, which has made reconciliation into a kind of catch-22 for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. On one hand, a single Fatah-Hamas unity government is widely viewed as a prerequisite for the creation of a successful Palestinian state: Palestinians claim both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank for a future state, and a single state ruled by rival governments is almost by definition a failed one. On the other hand, the Palestinian government – into which Hamas would be reintegrated under a unity deal – is committed by treaty to the recognition of Israel, an acknowledgement that Hamas refuses to make. Should the Palestinian Authority abandon its treaty commitments in order to placate Hamas, the move would be taken as confirming the fundamental skeptical concern regarding the Israeli-Palestinian peace process: that the Palestinians will abandon the largely symbolic concessions they’re expected to make, such as recognition of Israel, while pocketing Israel’s functionally irreversible territorial concessions.
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