https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17515/palestinian-police-state
These [Palestinian] leaders have turned the Palestinian Authority-controlled areas of the West Bank into a police state where political opponents are beaten to death, arrested, tortured and intimidated.
The crackdown was almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media in the West — until the death of Banat. It was ignored because the perpetrators were not Israeli policemen or soldiers. It was ignored because the media could not find a way to blame Israel for the fact that the Palestinian government was harassing, intimidating and torturing Palestinians.
The silence of the international community and media towards the human rights violations by the Palestinian Authority has prompted Palestinian journalists to make a direct appeal to the European Union to provide them with protection.
The protests… are mainly directed at the Biden administration, whose representatives have recently been courting and searching for ways to cozy up to Abbas and his Fatah cohorts. The message Palestinians are sending to the Biden administration: Stop empowering our brutal, corrupt leaders.
Will the Biden administration and the Western world actually legitimize — and reward with millions of dollars and possibly even a state – political leaders who brutalize, torture and murder their own journalists and citizens? To gain what? A legacy of America championing a regime like that?
Earlier this year, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas enacted a decree-law on boosting public freedoms ahead of the Palestinian parliamentary and presidential elections, which were supposed to take place on May 22 and July 31.
Article I of the law provides for “establishing an atmosphere of public freedoms in all the territories of Palestine, including the freedom to practice political and national action.”
Article II provides for “banning the detention, arrest, prosecution of, or holding to account, individuals for reasons relating to the freedom of opinion and political affiliation.”