RAMALLAH: In launching its bloody attack on Israel, Hamas has effectively sidelined the Palestinian Authority and stamped its authority across the whole of the occupied Palestinian territories, analysts said.
On Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath day of rest, hundreds of Hamas fighters from the Gaza Strip stormed across the Israeli border by land, air and sea, killing more than 1,200 people in Israel, mostly civilians, and seizing about 150 hostages under the cover of a deluge of rockets.
Israel has retaliated with artillery and air strikes on Gaza, killing more than 1,400 people during six days of intense fighting and imposing a "complete siege" there. It has also massed tens of thousands of troops along the border with Gaza in what appears to be a preparation for a ground invasion.
With its "Al-Aqsa Flood" campaign, Hamas has imposed itself "as the Palestinian interlocutor of reference, the one capable of dictating the political and military agenda", Xavier Guignard, a specialist on the Palestinian territories, told AFP.
Hamas, which has controlled Gaza since 2007, has been designated a terrorist group by Western powers including the United States and European Union.
The unprecedented operation was unlike anything "seen in the past year and a half in the occupied West Bank", said Guignard, of the Paris-based Noria Research centre.
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Lost legitimacy
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, whose PA controls parts of the West Bank but not Gaza, called Thursday for "an immediate end to the comprehensive aggression against the Palestinian people".
In his first public remarks since Saturday's attack, he said the targeting of civilians by both Israeli forces and Palestinian militants "contravenes morals, religion and international law".
But the authority's waning popularity in the West Bank and limited powers has relegated it to a largely observatory role.
Formed due to the Oslo Accords in 1993, the PA was supposed to make way for an independent Palestinian state. But that has failed to materialise due to stymied negotiations with Israel and internal Palestinian divisions.
After 30 years with no notable successes to its name, the authority has lost much of its legitimacy in the eyes of Palestinians -- whether in Gaza where it was ousted by Hamas in 2007 after the militants won elections or the West Bank where Abbas still rules despite his mandate expiring in 2009.
In September, a poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 62 percent of Palestinians considered the PA to have become "a burden on the Palestinian people".
Meanwhile, 58 percent of them expressed support for "a return to confrontations and armed intifada", or uprising, following the first and second intifadas of the 1980s-90s and the 2000s.
"The authority can continue to operate as a 'Potemkin village' without having any role," said Guignard, referring to the authorities' limited power against Israel as an occupying force.
"Fundamentally, the political project it embodies is the security cooperation with Israel and control of the Palestinian population for the benefit of Israel."
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'Can only ask for help'
The decision to cooperate with Israel has been heavily criticised by Palestinians, and helped fuel support for Hamas.
Hugh Lovatt, an analyst from the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the latest attack marks a "wholly new strategic direction by Hamas as it looks to re-assert itself at the vanguard of Palestinian resistance".
"Hamas appears to have now fully committed itself to open-ended confrontation, renouncing its previous governance role over Gaza and modus vivendi with Israel," he added.
On Tuesday night, demonstrators at a rally in support of Gaza waved green Hamas flags in the centre of PA-controlled Ramallah, with dozens of people shouting their support for the Islamist group.
The "entire Ramallah is Hamas," they chanted, before launching into slogans in praise of Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, Gaza's leaders of Hamas and its armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades.
And fighting has not been limited to the Gaza area or with Hamas.
In the West Bank, occupied by Israel since 1967 and now checkered with settlements and checkpoints, clashes with Israeli soldiers and settlers since Saturday have killed at least 31 Palestinians and injured 130, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
The Secretary-General of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which brings together all Palestinian movements except Hamas and Islamic Jihad, said they were "in contact with leaders around the world to stop the war" and "allow the entry of food and medicine into Gaza".
But Palestinian political analyst Jihad Harb pointed out that the PA "does not control Gaza or Hamas fighters, and it does not even have influence over Israel, so the only role it can play at this stage is to ask for help for Gaza."
