Palestinian Forces Are Openly Helping Israel Fight Its West Bank War

The circling drones buzz overhead as explosions echo. Bursts of gunfire between Israeli soldiers and fighters from the Palestinian refugee camp ring out. Israeli military jeeps patrol bulldozed roads outside the government hospital. Displaced camp resident, 29 year-old Noureddine Jarbou, sits in the courtyard watching the unending Israeli assault, his catheter bag attached to the side of his wheelchair.

Paralyzed from the waist down during an Israeli raid on the camp three years ago and then taken prisoner for two years, Jarbou looks across the choppy dirt road at his shattered coffee stand. Israeli troops have taken positions on rooftops and in buildings overlooking the area around the hospital, while Jeeps control the streets. It’s the fear of a potential sniper’s bullet that separates Jarbou from his ransacked livelihood. “Yesterday the army came, destroyed the lock, and had coffee,” Jarbou says about the Israeli soldiers he watched breaking into his roadside kiosk. “They smashed my CCTV cameras.”

This is not Gaza, where people are finally getting a moment of reprieve, amid an increasingly shaky cease-fire deal, after surviving 15 months of astonishing carnage that international human rights groups and United Nations bodies call genocide. It’s the city of Jenin in the Israeli-occupied West Bank — the new focus of Israel’s war as it adapts for the second Donald Trump era.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the Gaza cease-fire to pivot the war, launching a military assault from land and air across the northern West Bank on January 21, adding the destruction of its Palestinian fighters to Israel’s war goals. His defense minister, Israel Katz, has declared that the army will remain in Jenin’s camp indefinitely as Israeli attacks widen throughout the Palestinian heartland, displacing an estimated 40,000 people so far and killing more than 70. For Palestinains, it is just further confirmation that Israel’s actual goal of the war is to destroy them as a people and disposess them of their homeland. 

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Adapting its war to exploit the social and political divisions instilled by its occupation, Israel’s battle is fought on several fronts by different forces. The Israeli military is laying waste to refugee camps and working class neighborhoods that are home to Palestinian guerrilla groups, while locking in Palestinian cities, towns, and villages across the West Bank with checkpoints and roadblocks. There are also the settlers, protected by the Israeli army and often organized in militias, who attack and displace Palestinians to seize their land. At the same time, the lightly armed, Western-backed Palestinian Authority security forces have been waging their own protracted battle in the same places against the same people as the Israeli military. 

The conversation with Jarbou is interrupted by the rumble of Israeli armored personnel carriers driving past the hospital, down a road littered with overturned cars and mounds of dirt and concrete. Then, two Palestinian civilian plated black vans, filled with plain-clothed and uniformed Palestinian security forces dawning balaclavas, emerge from a street leading to the bullet-riddled Palestinian Authority compound. The building is home to security forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas — a limited security force that polices Palestinians but has no power over Israeli soldiers or settlers. Driving onto what’s left of a road the Israeli army restricts for its own vehicles and limited ambulance use, the vans are escorted by an Israeli Jeep and military bulldozer to the hospital, where staff say PA forces run an unofficial operations room.

The small convoy is an unprecedented public display of collaboration for a security force that traditionally disappears from the streets and retreats to their barracks when the Israeli army rolls in, and the officers in the van know it. As soon as the vans turn into the ER entrance, one officer in civilian clothes gets out and sternly orders us to delete any images or footage of the convoy, threatening ominous consequences if we don’t comply.

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Long suspected of intelligence sharing with Israel, the PA has a track record of targeting the same Palestinians involved in anti-occupation activities as Israel’s military. Not wanting to be seen as working alongside their occupier, cooperation has always strictly remained in the shadows. Camp residents and hospital staff express shock at the extent of open coordination they have seen since the Israeli army returned, saying it’s a first for them. “I have never seen such a direct interaction between the two,” Jarbou says.

Several workers at the hospital describe PA forces using the roof to fire into Jenin’s refugee camp prior to the Israeli invasion and arresting a doctor for treating wounded fighters. They say that all employees are required to turn in any militant from the camp seeking treatment to the PA.

Awaiting surgery for injuries caused in the raid in April 2022, when a hail of Israeli bullets were pumped into him as he stood in the street, Jarbou recounts now losing his home in late January to the army that had already taken the use of his legs. Displaced from the camp on January 21, his wife and three-year-old daughter have taken refuge with their relatives in a nearby village. Jarbou and his wife were able to briefly go back to their home on January 23 to collect belongings and found streets full of petrified people as hundreds of their neighbors fled for their lives. 

Jarbou and his wife’s passage was brokered by the Palestine Red Crescent, the main ambulance and first aid service operating in Jenin, but after struggling down the bulldozed streets under an expanding assault, they found Israeli soldiers in their apartment and using their building as a sniper’s nest. “I saw displaced people, families leaving their houses under the eyes of the military, who were filming every single person,” says Jarbou. Shuffling in discomfort from his injuries, he describes people being detained and taken prisoner randomly, amidst scenes of desperation that invoke images of Gaza’s destruction. “I saw elderly people, some with walkers and wheelchairs. People carrying their children, blankets, and food.”

The UN office for humanitarian affairs estimates that 90 percent of the 24,000 residents have fled the densely packed 0.16 square-mile camp. The camp was built for Palestinians forced to flee the Haifa area amid the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from homes and land that became Israel during the 1948 war, a defining national trauma that Palestinians call the Nakba, or Catastrophe. 

The Israeli army now freely roams Jenin’s streets. Devastating scenes of war wreckage scar the refugee camp. The few residents still present go between buildings with facades ripped off by shells and those reduced to rubble, in a desperate bid to make it home, dodging the Israeli troops and snipers controlling the surrounding streets. As the Israeli army blasts through the refugee camp, hunting the locally organized groups of fighters, PA security forces continue to do battle with the same groups in neighboring streets and towns. 

Israel’s military refused to comment on its coordination with the PA in Jenin, denying that it ordered camp residents to evacuate, while refusing to say when or if the thousands of displaced residents will be allowed to return home.

IN GAZA, THE GUNS are silent and the skies are clear of drones and warplanes for the first time since 2023, after Hamas led the deadly Oct. 7 attacks against Israel. 

For the 2.3 million Palestinians who have been continuously displaced and starved under the Israeli siege, it’s an unimaginable break from the constant death from above. Survival itself feels like victory after Israel razed their homes to their ground, shattering civilian infrastructure, hospitals, and the water supply, while killing more than 60,000 people, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

“I am happy the bloodshed will stop, even if [just] for some months or days,” Noor Alyacoubi says with trepidation. The 27-year-old mother of a toddler remained in Gaza City while most residents fled south at the beginning of the war. Running for safety between neighborhoods as the Israeli army invaded, she saw its shells blow up everything she knew while struggling to keep her family alive, battling sickness and hunger. 

A writer and translator, she’s been one of the few documenting life in northern Gaza while surviving what Human Rights Watch describes as an “extermination.” Throughout the war she’s written about her experiences for Al Jazeera, the Qatari funded international news network that’s been the only foreign media outlet to report from Gaza during the war. Four Al Jazeera journalists have been killed by the Israeli military since the start of the war, and the network has been banned by both Israel and the PA.

Even with nothing to return to on streets made unrecognizable, hundreds of thousands of Gaza’s Palestinians rushed home to crater-filled communities of broken concrete and rebar to bury the dead and try to rebuild. “My husband went to see if his sister’s house was still standing,” says Alyacoubi after the cease-fire took hold.” He also wanted to go to Jabalia [refugee camp] to find and bury his cousin’s body.” 

Still out of reach, she continues to hope for basic survival, “to sleep comfortably, to eat well, return to work, reunite with family, go to the sea, take some fresh air, and walk through the streets without fear.”

While Palestinians in Gaza are determined to rebuild, Trump, who recently began his second presidential term, has issued a plan for a very different outcome. (It’s a plan that could be hastened by the commander-in-chief’s call to tear up the cease-fire if all Israeli captives are not released on noon Saturday, encouraging Israel to return to war after Hamas suspended future hostage releases in protest of violations of the agreement.) Standing at a joint White House press conference last week with Netanyahu, Trump rewrote foreign policy to officially embrace ethnic cleansing in the Middle East, declaring that the U.S. should replace Israel as Gaza’s occupier and redevelop it after its Palestinian residents are forced out. 

“I have no doubt that the king in Jordan and the general in Egypt will give us the land we need to get this done,” Trump said about Jordan’s King Abduallah and Egypt’s President Abdel Fatah al Sisi, contending the permanent displacement that Gaza’s Palestinians to neighboring countries would pave the way for what he called a “Riviera of the Middle East.”  

Egypt and Jordan, which border Israel and the occupied territories,  swiftly rejected the idea, refusing to accommodate any expulsion. Their condemnation was echoed by Saudi Arabia after Netanyahu suggested it host a Palestinian state for those expelled from Gaza. 

However, Netanyahu gushed from the podium about Trump changing the course of history, while the president added that he’s also considering support for Israeli annexation of the West Bank. 

AFTER A SERIES of extended Israeli army incursions into the West Bank in the summer and fall, the PA launched their own campaign. Starting on December 5, the operation that sealed the Jenin camp, knocked out its power, and trapped residents in a bloody crossfire officially came to an end when the Israeli army arrived on January 21 — the day after Trump took office, and two days into Gaza’s cease-fire. 

According to a ranking officer in the PA security forces, who spoke to Rolling Stone on condition of anonymity, the PA operation launched during the final months of the Biden administration is unlikely to end soon and is the result of pressure from their U.S. and EU funders. He says the Gaza cease-fire and Israel’s invasion of the West Bank won’t affect the PA’s campaign.

Sitting in a drab, fluorescent-lit Palestinian General Intelligence office in Ramallah, the Israeli-occupied central West Bank city that serves as the hilly seat of PA governance, General Anwar Rajab acknowledges unprecedented coordination with Israel. 

Three black Volkswagen vans with civilian plates, the same model as those escorted by the Israeli military in Jenin, are parked in front of a suburban office building. However, dressed in full military attire, the stalky, gray-haired spokesman for the PA’s security forces denies the kind of coordination that Rolling Stone observed in Jenin is happening. “There is no joint work with occupation forces in the field,” he says. 

Nine miles, a wall, and checkpoint away from Jerusalem, the divided city where Israel has its capital and Palestinians hope to create a capital in the occupied east, Rajab paints the Palestinian fighters from camps as Iranian proxies — parroting an Israeli government talking point. 

Still, he acknowledges that even in the security forces, there have been arrests of those suspected of supporting or joining camp resistance groups, though he declines to give numbers. Responding to West Bank Palestinians’ broadly felt loathing of the PA for widespread corruption and years of cooperation with Israeli security forces, Rajab presents what has been dubbed “Operation Protect the Homeland” as a way of preventing the devastation of Gaza from coming to the West Bank. 

“The issue is that we should not give this government the opportunity to do here what it did in Gaza,” says Rajab, accusing Israel’s leaders of looking for an excuse to bring the scorched earth of Gaza to the West Bank. 

He knows the PA is powerless to slow the expanding, fortified Israeli suburban colonies that tower over and flank West Bank Palestinian communities to accommodate the 500,000 settlers deemed illegal by international law. Unable to even intervene to protect Palestinians against escalating attacks from armed settlers trying to displace them, he sees working with the U.S. while confronting his own people as the only option. “America is the international community. Iran is the opposite of the international community,” says Rajab, as if speaking directly to Trump. “We are a product of the international community.”

For him, the repression is proof to Washington that the PA can take over Gaza, 17 years after it lost control of the coastal strip in a U.S.-backed bloody national split with Hamas. “There is no shame in that,” he says. “America is important.”

It’s a strategy that’s failed to impact Netanyahu’s commitment to preventing a Palestinian state — or Trump’s proposal to expel Gaza’s Palestinians. Nonetheless, Rajab sees resistance as futile. He points to the devastation in Gaza and Lebanon, where Israeli troops remain, as an example of the failure of armed resistance. 

“Oct. 7 was a decision by Hamas with the support of Iran,” Rajab argues, placing the prime responsibility for killing, suffering, and displacement on Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic nationalist movement (deemed a terrorist organization across the West) that has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007. “They took the decision to go to war alone, which brought us this Nakba.”

For Shawan Jabarin — director of the Palestinian Human rights organization, Al Haq, the PA isn’t acting in defense of Palestinian rights but rather is operating as a subcontractor of the occupation. He sees the choice to work with Israeli forces as the product of both corrupt officials looking to preserve their own wealth and power and those who believe it’s the only way to minimize violence against Palestinians. “Some of them do it in good faith,” he says. “Others not.”

Leaning back in his chair in a Ramallah office that the Israeli army raided and shuttered two and a half years ago, he describes how his staff in Gaza have spent the war documenting the atrocities they survived while living in the rubble. Seeing the war as shifting focus rather than ending, Al Haq and seven other groups in the Palestinian Human Rights Organization Council penned an open letter to Abbas condemning the PA. 

“Amidst ongoing Israeli crimes of genocide and ethnic cleansing,” reads the letter. “Palestinian and International human rights organizations have documented numerous violations committed by Palestinian security forces against the public,” it continues, listing torture, collective punishment, repression of media freedoms, and arbitrary arrests. 

RAIN POURS DOWN on the impoverished Tulkarm refugee camp, flooding through the shell holes and demolished walls of peoples apartments. As broken streets turn to mud between crowded gray stucco apartment buildings, here too, 28 miles southwest of Jenin, the Israeli drones watch from above. 

Meeting in a narrow alleyway wedged between apartment buildings, “Ibn Sumud,” a fighter with the Tulkarm Brigade recounts surviving six shots to the abdomen in a frantic running battle with Israeli forces last year. “I literally picked up my intestines, put the gun away, and ran to hide somewhere,” says the urban guerilla in his mid-twenties, as he talks about narrowly surviving as friends were killed in front of him. Declining to give his name because he fears being targeted by both the PA and Israel, Sumud was arrested by both before he took up arms. 

“They are our people, but they work against us,” he says about the PA security forces. “In the end we’re under two occupations.” 

The brigade, based on the same model as Jenin and other West Bank refugee camps, attracts young Palestinians from across the political spectrum. According to Sumud, those that take up arms in the camp are united by the view that combating Israeli armored vehicles and drones with assault rifles and IEDs is their only chance to win freedom, or at least shape their fate. Originally a member of Abbas’ secular nationalist Fatah movement, he had left it for Hamas when he joined the Tulkarm Brigade. For him, it is not the party that matters but the willingness to resist occupation.

Like Jenin, Tulkarm’s camp has become an increasing target of both PA and Israeli forces since the war started, but in this Israeli assault, 10,000 residents have been forced out. Sumud says that their struggle is shaped by Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and its expansion of the war across the Middle East, but it is defined by the violence of the segregation imposed upon them and the inability to change the worsening reality they were raised into.

In the years before the war, Sumud worked in Israel and was an avid soccer fan of the Palestinian league. Now, he doesn’t leave the camp, and his energy is focused on staying alive and fighting back as his friends get gunned down or blown up around him. He hopes Trump’s return to office will ignite widespread rebellion across the West Bank, but he sees the war spreading either way: “The war zone will extend under Trump.”

 — Ahmad al-Bazz contributed to reporting from the West Bank