the The crowd got angry The funeral of the fighters killed in the two-day Israeli operation highlighted the unpopularity of the Palestinian Authority and the widening differences between the various Palestinian factions.
Members of the central committee of Abbas’s Fatah movement expelled the three as thousands of mourners turned on them, chanting “Get out! Get out!”
Abbas, 87, who refused pressure to step down, visited the cemetery where the funeral took place, at the entrance to the Jenin refugee camp.
Surrounded by his personal presidential bodyguards, he addressed the crowds on the outskirts of the camp, where tattered streets and burning buildings bear witness to the intensity of the explosion. The largest Israeli operation in the occupied West Bank in 20 years.
Abbas said, “The heroic Jenin camp stood in the face of the aggression, sacrificed its wounded, and gave everything it had for the sake of the homeland.”
Tell the cheering crowd that the camp will be rebuilt.
While Abbas condemned the Israeli raid on Jenin and announced that he was suspending a security cooperation agreement with Israel, many Palestinians feel that was his position. hopelessly compromised With violence spreading across the West Bank.
“Where have they been all those years?” said a man in the camp who declined to be named for fear of reprisals from the security forces. “They don’t care about us.”
For more than a year, Israeli raids in cities like Jenin and Nablus have become routine. Hundreds of Palestinians were killed, mostly combatants but many civilians as well, while a series of Palestinian attacks killed dozens of Israelis.
The Palestinian Authority, established following the Oslo peace accords three decades ago, exercises limited governance over parts of the West Bank, including Jenin, but has been powerless to stop Israeli raids or control armed groups.
PA security forces, including members of Abbas’s Presidential Guard unit, were deployed in large numbers to Jenin after tensions flared with other factions during the funeral last week.
Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls Gaza and the Iran-backed Islamic Jihad, have long been at odds with the Palestinian Authority, but Abbas has also faced growing criticism from within his own party, Fatah, which also has an armed wing active in Jenin.
(Reporting by Nidal Mughrabi from Gaza; Writing by James Mackenzie and Angus McSwan)
