West Bank close to breaking point, says senior Palestinian official
The occupied West Bank faces economic collapse in the coming weeks, a senior Palestinian Authority politician has said, warning of further escalation if Israel imposes restrictions during Ramadan.
Dr Sabri Saidam, deputy secretary general of the Fatah Central Committee and an adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said that the war in Gaza has been pushing the West Bank closer to breaking point.
“Ramadan is a holy month, and emotions are charged even further, so things will escalate beyond the borders of Palestine” if Israel restricts access to Al Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem, he said. “Maybe it will get worse – much worse.”
More than 400 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank amid a surge in settler violence and Israeli military raids since the war in Gaza began in October, and Dr Saidam warned that the bloodshed would get worse “unless the world intervenes now and says enough is enough”.
Since the October 7 attacks by Hamas, many of the 500,000 illegal settlers in the West Bank have behaved like militias, killing Palestinians without fear of consequences, he said.
“We stand at a point in history where humanity is reconsidering matters by talking about the recognition of a Palestinian state, but that is not enough.”
In addition to the increase in settler violence, Palestinians in the West Bank are facing an impending economic collapse, made worse by the war in Gaza.
The looming financial crash is the result of Israel cutting tax revenue to the Palestinian Authority and preventing 40,000 Palestinians from entering Israel for work.
“According to our figures, the economy is going to collapse in the coming few weeks,” Dr Saidam told The National. The authority has been forced to borrow heavily from banks to keep it afloat, but now those financial institutions have warned it is “way beyond our limit of capital, so we’re unable to provide any more funds”.
Iran-backed Hamas defeated Fatah in the Gaza election in 2006, and expelled the party from the enclave the following year after a civil war. No elections have been held in Gaza or the West Bank since.
But Dr Saidam said Hamas has grown in popularity since its attacks on southern Israel in October.
“Those in confrontational mode with Israel are winning,” he said.
“This is a confirmed reality, which we refuse to accept. It is confirmed because of the failure of years of a peace process that has yielded absolutely zero results.”
Hamas’s popularity has increased “simply because people feel let down” by the lack of progress towards Palestinian statehood. Referring to the 1994 Oslo Peace Accords, Dr Saidam said while Fatah had adopted the peace process, “Israel gave us the process with no peace”.
Fatah has “a lot of work to do” to recover its political position, he said, but in times of war voters are driven by emotions, not by “brains and logic”.
The Gaza war is a personal tragedy for Dr Saidam, as 76 members of his extended family have been killed, he said.
Dr Saidam, who has a physics degree from Imperial College London, said his mother comes from Rafah and his father from Nuseirat refugee camp, areas of Gaza that have been hit by repeated Israeli air strikes throughout the war.
Their suffering has been unimaginable, he said. “In Gaza, they say those who have been killed are dead, but those who are alive are psychologically dead.”
With Israel poised to launch an attack on Rafah, the situation is “super scary” and life has become “extremely hellish”, Dr Saidam said.
While “almost every aspect of life has been destroyed” in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority could take on full governance of the enclave when the war is over, “although this is a mission that is not at all celebrated, given the fact that you’re going to ground zero”.
He predicted that the 44,000-strong Palestinian security forces would help to police Gaza after the war, but said the enclave would also need a UN-controlled buffer zone along its border with Israel.
Despite the bleak prospects of peace, Dr Saidam underlined the importance of reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis.
“Even in the worst of times, Palestinians never surrender the fact that they call Jews our cousins,” he said.
Dr Saidam condemned the extremist positions of Israeli politicians such as Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has goaded Palestinians with his visits to Al Aqsa.
He said the Israeli far-right would only “bring more wrath, more hatred into the region”.
Peace was impossible as long as Benjamin Netanyahu remains as Israel’s Prime Minister, he said.
“No Palestinian will ever accept shaking his hand because of what he’s done in Gaza.”