In the West Bank city of Tubas, the Palestinian Authority has been rounding up terror operatives who are spoiling for a fight with Israel and challenging its own rule, seeking to show it can help shape the future for Palestinians after the war in Gaza.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas has poured forces into Tubas in an avowed push to quash lawlessness and deny Israel pretexts to raid the city.

His adversaries, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), say the PA is serving Israel’s agenda at a time when Israel is going after their operatives in the West Bank as they battle Israel in Gaza, sharpening old divisions between Abbas and the terror groups.

Residents of Tubas said clashes between the terrorists and the PA this month involved heavy machine guns and bombs in some of the worst violence they can remember.

It highlights the precarious position of the PA, which was established by the 1994 Oslo Accords with Israel, as a stepping stone to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The so-called two-state solution appears as far as ever, though it has come back into international focus of late as a way to bring peace. Israel, however, mistrusts Abbas and the PA, accusing it of incitement to terrorism in its education system and by paying stipends to jailed terror operatives and families of slain terrorists.

Abbas’s secularist Fatah faction also recently issued condolences on the “martyrdom” of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, architect of the shock assault that sparked the Gaza war on October 7, 2023, when thousands of terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages.

Amid the war in Gaza, Israel has also launched several counterterrorism raids across the West Bank, especially in the north. The army says it has arrested 5,250 wanted Palestinians, including 2,050 affiliated with Hamas.

According to the PA health ministry, 716 Palestinians have been killed in the raids. Israel says the vast majority were gunmen killed in exchanges of fire, rioters who clashed with troops or terrorists carrying out attacks.

The Ramallah-based PA controlled Gaza until 2007, when Hamas routed forces loyal to Abbas, but is now confined to running patches of the West Bank — often in coordination with Israeli security forces, who control the territory.

The United States has said it wants to see the war in Gaza end with the Strip and the West Bank unified under a reformed and revitalized PA.

For Abbas, 88, the Tubas campaign is partly about weakening the grip Hamas and PIJ have gained over the northern West Bank, in what his Fatah sees as an Iran-backed attempt to undermine its position, according to Fatah officials and security sources.

It is also about disproving critics who view the PA as ineffective — a reputation that has overshadowed US-led diplomatic contacts over the role it might eventually play in Gaza, according to a former PA security official and an analyst.

A US State Department spokesperson declined comment on the Tubas operation, but acknowledged that US security cooperation with the PA includes funding, training and equipment.

Tubas Governor Ahmed al-Asaad said the PA had decided to strike with “an iron fist” against what he described as lawlessness and anarchy.

Two PA security men have been wounded as their forces fought members of the “Tubas Battalion,” an armed group dominated by PIJ, and detained at least three of its members, including its leader.

Al-Asaad said the PA was responding to public concern, giving the example of a bomb that had been recently planted near a school — apparently in preparation for an attack on Israeli forces.

“We don’t want — under the slogan of resistance or any other slogan — to destroy our country and to destroy Tubas,” he said.

“Our approach is clear and is the approach of the president: the approach of peaceful, popular resistance and safeguarding security and order,” he told Reuters in an interview.

The Palestinian Authority has overhauled its operations in a variety of areas, assuaging some of the concern expressed by countries that provide aid.

On the whole, the revitalization effort had been “pretty well received,” a European diplomat said.

On Saturday, dozens of PA security men surrounded a building near Tubas where two Battalion gunmen were holed up, with one of them, Obada al-Masri, threatening to blow himself up, a source familiar with the incident said.

“We negotiated with him for almost five hours,” said his father, Abdel Majid al-Masri, who was called to the scene to help convince his son to surrender.

He said his son eventually agreed after receiving guarantees he would be held in Tubas rather than at another PA jail where he was previously incarcerated and had suffered mistreatment.

Masri expressed relief that his son had been taken into PA custody rather than killed by Israeli forces, which have also been raiding Tubas in search of terror operatives and had previously jailed his son for three years.

His son had chosen “the route of struggle to liberate Palestine,” he said, rejecting PA accusations that Battalion members were engaged in lawlessness.

PIJ condemned the operation, saying PA forces appeared to be aiming to eliminate resistance to Israel and their methods were no different.

PA security forces were heavily deployed, with a checkpoint on a road into the city, when Reuters visited Tubas this week, but the city was calm.

Ghaith al-Omari, an expert on PA affairs at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the Tubas campaign was a much-needed attempt by the PA to assert itself in a part of the West Bank where its control had been “practically absent.”

“The PA understands that nobody sees it as being capable of running Gaza and everyone cites the fact that they can’t even run the northern West Bank,” said Omari, who has advised both Abbas and his predecessor, Yasser Arafat.

But one operation did not make a reputation, Omari said, noting that Tubas represented “low-hanging fruit” and that Hamas and PIJ were weaker there than in Jenin, also in the northern West Bank.

With US support, the 35,000-strong PA security forces were reconstituted after the 2007 Hamas takeover of Gaza.

Yet, the Washington Institute said in a July policy note, for the PA to assume governance in Gaza it would need extensive recruitment, equipment, vetting and training, a process it said would take years.

Israel, which accuses the PA of support for terrorism, has also rejected the notion of PA governance in Gaza.

While declining to comment on a potential role for PA security forces in post-war Gaza, the US State Department spokesperson reiterated that sustained peace in Gaza “must include Palestinian-led governance and Gaza unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority.”

In the West Bank, the biggest issue was that PA security forces were “really, really unpopular in the north,” Omari said.

A September opinion poll showed that 89% of Palestinians in the West Bank want Abbas to resign, and that Hamas has more support than Fatah there. Polls by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research have consistently shown that Marwan Barghouti, a Fatah leader jailed by Israel for murder, would win any presidential vote.

Omari said: “To do effective security you need both capabilities but also you need credibility and legitimacy.”