Israel, Palestinian Authority ‘in Secret Contact’ Despite Publicly Troubled Ties

Israel and the Palestinian Authority are secretly maintaining communications between senior officials despite the PA publicly severing security coordination during the recent wave of violence, news outlets in the US and Israel have reported. The PA halted the security coordination with Israel in January, following a raid by Israeli forces at the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, in which nine Palestinians were killed.

Quoting three sources, the US-based Axios news website said that senior aides to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and PA President Mahmoud Abbas have secretly been communicating for almost two months, in an attempt to lower tensions in the West Bank.

The Times of Israel, meanwhile, cited a Palestinian official as saying that the lines of communication were established in January by PLO Executive Committee Secretary-General Hussein al-Sheikh and Israeli National Security Council Chairman Tzachi Hanegbi, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party. The official said that the two have held at least one face-to-face meeting and conducted a number of phone conversations since the channel was created. According to the official, the White House played a role in setting up the back channel, passing the request from Sheikh to the Israelis even before Netanyahu had finished forming his new government in the wake of the November 2022 elections. The request was repeated once the new government was in place.

Sources told Axios that it was unclear whether the heads of some of the parties that make up the Israeli government, the most right-wing in the country’s history, were even aware of the communication.