ReportThe Palestinian Authority accuses exiled dissident Mohammed Dahlan of causing unrest in this refugee camp near Nablus.
Light does not enter the tight alleys of Balata, the largest refugee camp in the West Bank, at the entrance to Nablus. But the rain slips in there without embarrassment, without limit, carting the earth and the garbage, sending home the young men of the district with the prodigious slicked-back hairstyles. The armed police lookouts, invisible on the roofs, can lower their guard.
Since autumn, Balata has been bubbling. The Palestinian Authority (PA) is increasing the number of arrests in this area reluctant to control, created for refugees from the 1948 war, where 27,000 people are crowded together over less than 1 square kilometer. Each incursion threatens to degenerate into an exchange of fire, and it never fails: the young men riot, spreading on the boulevards of Nablus. Here the guns are not turned against Israel – whose soldiers also carry out regular arrests in the camp – but between Palestinians. All claim to be Fatah.
Within the ruling party, the hierarchs are quietly fretting, with the approach of the legislative and presidential elections scheduled for May and July, the first in Palestine since 2006. Israeli military intelligence monitors this with concern. He guessed the beginnings of a violent struggle within Fatah for the succession of President Mahmoud Abbas, 85 years old, who has no “natural” heir.
In the streets of Balata, these tensions have already resulted in one death. In October 2020, Hatem Abou Rizq, 35, involved in a “Dispute between rival families”, killed himself while handling explosives, according to the governor of Nablus, Ibrahim Ramadan. For his comrades, it was an assassination planned by the police. The Fatah headquarters in the camp were set on fire. The leaders of the armed men in the camp are in hiding. The youngest fear the plainclothes police officers who, they say, watch them and instigate violence. “When they shoot, it is to kill”, says Mohammed Abou Jaber, 25.
The “scarecrow” Mohammed Dahlan
The governor assures him: Hatem Abou Rizq was paid by a cacique in exile of Fatah, Mohammed Dahlan, to cause unrest in the camp. “But that’s not why he died”, he specifies. This name, Dahlan, is causing irrational flare-ups in the Palestinian Authority. The 59-year-old former Palestinian counterterrorism leader fell out of favor in 2011. He was convicted in abstentia for corruption and reinvented himself in the United Arab Emirates.
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