Above: Reuters shot of the
exploded car being inspected
by Palestinian Security
When the Palestinian Authority (PA) turned the burner onto Hamas, saying its members had killed Muhyideen Al-Shareef, Adel Awadallah, the person supposedly to have pulled the trigger before getting Ghassan Addassi to set the charges to destroy the body, appeared masked on a video cassette (left) delivered to the Reuters office in Gaza to categorically deny the charges.
The Reuters office was promptly closed by the PA. Presumably just to show it doesn't pay to actually report what is going on in this country unless it is the PA version of reality.
Yet, assuming the Palestinian Authority was involved in some way in all of this, why would it have agreed to undertake such a dangerous step?
Last year, Israel repeatedly made any further redeployment from the West Bank conditional on the PA extraditing "34 Palestinian terrorists with Jewish blood on their hands." The handing over of individuals that the majority of Palestinians consider to be national revolutionary heros to certain torture and long periods of incarceration in Israel, would be certain political suicide for the PA. It is therefore surmised by some that Israel cut this different deal, which would be easier to play down for the PA.
In addition, the PA would in exchange reap the benefit of seeming to 'serve the national cause' in pursuing the killers of Shareef, while in effect having carte blanche to arrest any of the supposed 'suspects', its Islamic political opponents. The continued PA arrest of 'the usual suspects' from the Islamic movement, despite claiming that they have a clear confession, suggests that at least this part of the theory is correct.
This would explain why the PA bothered to clear Israel, why Netanyahu made such a veiled threat, why Reuters and the rest of the local media have been prevented from reporting openly on this, and why senior PA officials are reported to be going to such personal lengths to extract and confirm dubious confessions from very minor figures in the Islamic movement.
Whatever, the case, whatever the truth of all of this, it is clear that this time is very sensitive and critical for Palestinian society, and if handled badly by either the Palestinian Authority or the Islamic movement, could result in a distracting civil conflict that can only benefit Israel. Distraction, after all, is historically Israel's most powerful mechanism to buy time to change more facts on the ground in preparation for further redeployments and the ever-looming final status talks.
Although it is also clear that the Palestinian Authority has thrown the bomb (Sorry, I meant to write 'ball') into the court of the Islamic movement, I am not convinced , for reasons that this article should have made very clear, that this is the way to solve the current crisis. Especially when the lives of individuals like Ghassan, who just are not believeably involved in the whole mess, have been involved... That just isn't fair.