Activist’s death puts focus on Authority’s brutality

RAMALLAH, West Bank — Hundreds of Palestinians massed in central Ramallah’s Clock Tower Square one night in late June to protest the Palestinian Authority’s brutality after an anticorruption activist died in its custody. The activist, Nizar Banat, was seized in a wave of arrests, and, his family said, Palestinian security officers had beaten him to death.

The protest was peaceful until a group of progovernment cadres from the ruling Fatah party descended on it.

Reporters for The New York Times saw them charge at protesters, including young women and boys; throw stones at them; beat them with clubs, flagpoles and fists; and snatch cell phones from people suspected of documenting the events.

The unrest over Banat, whose death at the hands of Palestinian officials has been compared to the killing of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, has drawn fresh attention to what critics describe as the increasingly autocratic rule of Mahmoud Abbas, the authority’s octogenarian president, and its ever more blatant clampdown on any semblance of democratic process, freedom of expression, judicial independence and nongovernmental organizations.

“They are not hiding it anymore,” said Wissam Husseini, 29, a Palestinian yoga and meditation teacher who said he had been beaten and peppersprayed. “This is a second occupation actually, not really a government.”

Husseini, like many, was convinced that the assailants had been plainclothes Palestinian security officials. He described the Palestinian Authority as a corrupt “dictatorial group.”

The protests, which have spread to West Bank cities including Bethlehem and Hebron, come at a perilous time for Abbas.

His already dwindling popularity has plummeted since April when he canceled what would have been the first parliamentary and presidential elections in the occupied territories in more than 15 years.

During one recent protest, demonstrators marched toward Abbas’ headquarters in Ramallah chanting, “The people want the fall of the regime,” the refrain that helped topple dictators in the Arab Spring.