https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2022/10/07/it-is-always-about-iran/
Lest you think Israel is waging war on the Palestinian people or the Palestinian Authority—the nominal government of the West Bank territory—it is not. The P.A. is under siege by Iranian-supported Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, and P.A. strongman Mahmoud Abbas is thoroughly incapable of defending the government or the people. He is looking to Israel to save him and his regime. And Israel, to the extent it can, will try.
To call the relationship complicated is a severe understatement, but it always, always goes back to Iran.
On the one hand, the P.A. is corrupt to its eyeballs, and increasingly, its own people have been protesting the regime’s failures; it is hugely repressive—it jailed people for their Facebook posts, and killed regime critic and journalist Nizar Banat; and it incites violence against Israel and Jews as a way to maintain its revolutionary credentials.
At the U.N. General Assembly, Abbas lauded “the righteous martyrs of the Palestinian people who enlightened the path of freedom and independence with their pure blood.” The Fatah website has been calling for violence against Israelis, and more than once Abbas has announced he is abrogating all the P.A. agreements with Israel—including those regarding security cooperation. But that’s only until he needs security cooperation with the IDF to survive.
Which is the other hand for him and for Israel.
In the midst of rumbling unrest among West Bank Palestinians, Abbas is facing the latest round of the Hamas-Fatah civil war that began after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and ended with the expulsion of the P.A. from Gaza in 2007. With no Israel and no Fatah inside Gaza, Hamas won security control of the area—which should be a warning against a precipitous Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. With Iran as a patron, Hamas has since determined the level of aggression that would be used against Israel—and against Fatah.