Israel’s defence minister Benny Gantz and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas have agreed a series of measures aimed at helping the Palestinian government counter its Islamist rival Hamas, following rare overnight talks in central Israel.
In his first visit to Israel in at least a decade, Abbas, 86, met Gantz at the defence minister’s home late on Tuesday night. The talks came amid a financial crisis in the Palestinian Authority, which has limited self-rule in urban areas of the occupied West Bank.
“We discussed the implementation of economic and civilian measures, and emphasised the importance of deepening security co-ordination and preventing terror and violence — for the wellbeing of both Israelis and Palestinians,” Gantz wrote on Twitter late on Tuesday night.
Abbas did not release an official statement following the meeting, but Hussein Al-Sheikh, a senior Palestinian official, said the talks included the “importance of creating a political horizon” for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Israel has been alarmed by the surge in popularity of Islamist militant group Hamas in the West Bank following 11-days of fighting in May, in which hundreds were killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza, Hamas fired rockets that killed 13 in Israel and mass protests against the Israeli assault swept across the West Bank and towns in Israel.
Hamas declared itself victorious as a ceasefire eased some of the restrictions of an Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Gaza, and Hamas-linked politicians subsequently enjoyed a series of victories in municipal elections in the West Bank.
Both the US and Israel prefer the secular Fatah, led by Abbas, as their interlocutor with the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which seeks to establish a Palestinian state roughly along the ceasefire lines of the 1967 war, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Hamas seized the Gaza Strip from Fatah in 2007 after being denied a chance to take power even after sweeping election victories the previous year. Since then, it has fought four wars with Israel and jostled with Fatah for more representation in the PLO and other Palestinian legislative bodies.
After the Abbas-Gantz talks, Israel approved a handful of measures that would help Abbas, who is deeply unpopular among Palestinian youth, to keep the support of wealthy Palestinian families and ease the bureaucracy faced by some poorer Palestinians.
Israel will issue 1,100 new permits, including 600 so-called Business Man Cards, which are cherished by the Palestinian elite, to make it easier for them to pass through checkpoints out of the West Bank in their own cars. Dozens more VIP permits will be granted to allies of Abbas.
Meanwhile, 6,000 West Bank residents — some of them refugees, or descendants of refugees, from the 1948 and 1967 wars — will be able to be officially added to a population registry, and about 3,500 in Gaza will receive residency documentation, allowing them to more easily obtain official identity documents for travel or work within Israel.
Israel, which collects import taxes on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, will advance about Shk100m ($32m) to help ease some of the financial pressure on the PA, which has a deficit of more than $1bn, exacerbated by lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Tuesday night’s talks faced heavy criticism from Hamas and Israeli rightwingers. Hamas called them “obscene” and an affront “to the Palestinian spirit” in televised remarks. Israeli tanks fired on Hamas positions in Gaza on Wednesday afternoon after reports of an Israeli civilian being injured by shots fired from the Strip.
Rightwing Israeli leaders painted Gantz as weak. Prime minister Naftali Bennett’s “Israeli-Palestinian government” was putting Abbas “back on the agenda”, the Likud party, led by ousted five-time premier Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Twitter. “Dangerous concessions that will jeopardise Israel’s security are only a matter of time.”