Summary
For decades, international funding has supported the training of Palestinian Authority security forces with the aim of improving counterterrorism.
However, these forces have repeatedly sheltered individuals responsible for attacks on Israelis through a practice known as “protective custody,” which often involves temporary detention followed by release rather than prosecution.
This has left Israeli security forces to act independently to apprehend or eliminate suspects.
The pattern includes selective cooperation, limited accountability, and public praise for involvement in attacks, raising concerns about future security arrangements and underscoring calls for stricter oversight and vetting in any new international security framework.
Over the last three decades, and with greater intensity since 2006-2007, the United States and the European Union have donated tens of millions of dollars to train the Palestinian Authority Security Forces (PASF). Despite the good intentions, instead of using the donations to effectively fight terror and prosecute Palestinian terrorists for acts of terror against Israelis, the Palestinian Authority (PA) continues its policy of protecting terrorist murderers. The result is that Israeli security forces are required to step in and fill the vacuum.
On May 29, 2024, two soldiers, Staff Sergeant Diego Gavriel Harsaj and Staff Sergeant Eliya Hilel, were murdered by Palestinian terrorist Abdul-Raouf Shtayyeh. Having avoided capture at the scene of the murder, Shtayyeh then turned himself in to the PASF. While Shtayyeh was temporarily held in protective custody by the PASF, he was eventually released. On November 24, 2025, acting on intelligence information, Shtayyeh was eliminated by Israeli security forces.
The incident with Shtayyeh is not unique. In the past, other Palestinian murderers have similarly sought, and found, “protective custody” in the hands of the PASF.
The practice of the PASF shielding the terrorists is referred to as “protective custody,” since the PASF merely feigns arrest, even sometimes holding the terrorist in secure locations as a means to prevent Israel from arresting the terrorist.
The fake nature of the “protective custody” is clear since the PA has never indicted a Palestinian terrorist for the murder of Israelis, nor has the PA ever officially handed over a Palestinian terrorist to the Israeli authorities.
On a few isolated occasions, the PA did prosecute Palestinian terrorists who murdered Israelis, but they were never indicted for murder. Rather, they were indicted for causing damage to the Palestinian national cause. On other occasions, the PASF did use the much-touted security coordination with Israel to provide information about the whereabouts of Palestinian terrorists. These incidents were, as a general rule and with very few exceptions, limited to terrorists from Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the other Palestinian terrorist organizations, with the almost complete exclusion of terrorists from Fatah and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
While protecting the terrorists, the PA also celebrated and gloated1 about the participation in acts of terror of members of the PA security forces.
President Trump’s Gaza Peace Plan envisages a “newly trained and vetted Palestinian police force” carrying out different functions in cooperation with the International Stabilization Force (ISF).
Since the experience thus far with the PA security forces has been particularly negative, to avoid a repeat situation, the ISF must ensure that the vetting process includes Israeli approval of every new member of the police force.
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