Supporters celebrate Fatah’s 55th anniversary in Gaza City on January 1, 2020. Photo: Fatah. http://fatehorg.ps/?p=16727

As part of its ongoing competition with the Hamas terror organization about who is leading the terror campaign against Israel, Fatah has published the names and pictures of 23 terrorist members of the Palestinian Authority (PA) Security Forces, which is part of the Fatah-ruled PA.

Palestinian Media Watch (PMW)  has exposed that in order to gain the people’s favor, the PA/Fatah have in the past year profiled themselves as leading the “resistance” against Israel, while blaming Hamas for doing nothing, and even accusing the Gaza-based terror organization of collaborating with Israel.

The poster above, published by Fatah, shows 30 “Martyrs of the Palestinian [PA] Security Forces.” One in the first row and all six in the last row were killed in clashes with Islamist terrorists at the Ain Al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon in July-August 2023. PMW identified the remaining 23 as known terrorists who were killed while attacking Israelis — see more information on those terrorists here.

Fatah has previously bragged about the double role for these men, stating they are PA police and security officers by day, and terrorists by night. These are the very security forces who have been funded and even trained by Western donors to fight terror.

A recent video exposed by PMW shows photos of 24 armed terrorists who were salaried members of the PA Security Forces. To stress that the dual roles are not conflicting, each picture includes the logos of the terror organization and the branch of the PA military. 

One such PA Security Forces terrorist left a “message for the Zionist enemy,” threatening that “fear will prevail among you and [my] actions will torment you and send you to a place where your blood will drip,” and that “the future will not bring you good or tranquillity, but rather death and humiliation.”

As part of the “terror competition,” Fatah has bragged that “more than 355 of our prisoners are from the Palestinian [PA] Security Forces — in other words, the PA’s soldiers.” In March 2023, Fatah boasted that Fatah and the PA Security Forces “led 1,500” terror attacks while Hamas led none.

In December 2022, Fatah said it had murdered 20 Israelis, and that 90% of the terrorist “Martyrs” were Fatah members, while in October, the movement put the number of terror attacks against Israel “shaded by the PA” at 7,200 in that year alone.

The PA has announced that hundreds of PA Security Forces members are in prison for terror offenses they committed during the five-year PA terror campaign known as the Second Intifada, while Mahmoud Abbas’ deputy in Fatah has also admitted that the PA Security Forces are working together with terrorists. In 2021, Fatah official Jibril Rajoub bragged that 12%of terrorist prisoners are from the PA Security Forces.

The author is a senior analyst at Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared.