Israeli Press
Israeli analyst says Dahlan is angling to broker Gaza's post-Hamas order
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Mohammed Dahlan is working to cast himself as the central broker of Gaza's postwar arrangement — an alternative to Hamas and the Palestinian Authority alike — the Israeli news site Ynet published Thursday in an analysis by Michael Milshtein.
Milshtein heads the Palestinian Studies Forum at Tel Aviv University's Moshe Dayan Center and formerly ran the Palestinian affairs desk of Israeli military intelligence; his reading carries that establishment's lens and its access.
In his telling, the exiled Fatah strongman has surfaced this week more prominently than at any point since October 2023, riding the announcement of the Board of Peace's fifteen-point plan. Figures in Dahlan's Democratic Reform current claim their man persuaded Hamas's leadership to accept the plan's loosely worded disarmament and technocratic-government clauses.
"Dahlan is the key to the breakthrough of the past week. None of the shifts would have happened without him."
Sufyan Abu Zaida, a leader of Dahlan's camp, quoted in the analysis
The numbers explain the ambition. A May survey by the Ramallah pollster AWRAD found 38 percent of Gazans would vote Dahlan for president, against 21 for Marwan Barghouti, 14 for Hussein al-Sheikh and barely 5 for Hamas candidates. Pollster Khalil Shikaki, quoted by Milshtein, says Dahlan compensates for the popularity problem all Palestinian leaders share by pushing projects that answer the population's existential needs.
His base remains Abu Dhabi, where he advises Mohammed bin Zayed while his movement distributes aid inside Gaza — and the analysis ran the very day Israel's cabinet weighed the plan he claims to have brokered.
