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Mohammed Dahlan

Mohammed Dahlan — the former national security adviser and a leader of the Fatah party — was once seen by both Washington and the Arab world as a go-to mediator between Tel Aviv and Gaza. Dahlan had once been praised by George W Bush and was chosen by neoconservatives to lead a coup against the elected Hamas government in Gaza in 2007. Gaza-based Fatah leader Mohammed Dahlan who was selected to lead the mission of overthrowing Hamas. The choice was made by W Bush’s own National Security Council Middle East adviser, Elliot Abrams. The neocons were leading a campaign to construct a “New Middle East“, which was the culmination of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s aggressive “diplomacy” in the region.

The report published by the New York Times on the role of Muhammad Dahlan in participating in the discussion of the future of Gaza after the war, brought back the spotlight on the prominent Palestinian leader who, despite being away from the Palestinian political scene for years, his name was not completely absent and became more prominent after October 7, 2023.

Dahlan, who resides in the UAE, revealed in the report a plan that Arab leaders are discussing “secretly” for the future of the Gaza Strip after the war, according to which power in Gaza will be handed over to a new, independent Palestinian leader who can rebuild the Strip under the protection of an Arab peacekeeping force.

The new Palestinian leader will also assume responsibility for parts of the West Bank currently administered by the Palestinian Authority, said Dahlan, who currently does not have any official status in the Palestinian territories.

Dahlan (62 years old) said that this new leader, whose identity was not revealed, will replace the current President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, who is 88 years old, and who will retain a ceremonial role. For years, Dahlan has been among the potential candidates to succeed Abbas, an old friend and current rival, in the Palestinian Authority, even as he moved into exile in Abu Dhabi since 2011.

Dahlan, who rarely gives interviews to the Western press, gave an interview with the American magazine " Time " a little more than a month after the outbreak of the war, which said that he had become "flirting with the media." In his recent interview with the New York Times, Dahlan, who has a political career full of controversial moments, renewed his assertions that he is not interested in assuming an official leadership position in any future Palestinian government.

However, he said in his interview with Time magazine last November: “But I will help if there is an opportunity to rebuild the Palestinian political system.”

Dahlan, a warlord by any standards, had good ties with Israel, a strong position within Fatah and was deeply connected to various Arab intelligence agencies. He also commanded 10 security branches in Gaza, dedicated mostly to cracking down on dissent. Many of those imprisoned and tortured by Dahlan’s forces, funded and trained under a programme managed by US Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, targeted Hamas fighters, political leaders and supporters. The plan was a massive failure. In the matter of a few days in the summer of 2007, Hamas routed Dahlan’s forces, and, until this day, single-handedly controlled Gaza. Dahlan was born on September 29, 1961 in Khan Younis Refugee Camp located in the Gaza Strip. Dahlan became politically active as a teenager in the Khan Younis camp and helped to establish the Fatah Youth Movement in 1981. During the next several years, Dahlan took part in the first intifada and was arrested 11 times for his activities; Israel deported him to Jordan in 1988.

From Jordan, Dahlan moved to Tunis and began working with the exiled PLO leadership, including Yasser Arafat. When Arafat returned to the Gaza Strip in 1994, he placed Dahlan as head of the Preventive Security Service and the Fatah movement in the Gaza area. Starting with nothing, Dahlan built up a force of 20,000 men, which made him one of the most powerful leaders of the Palestinian independence movement. Dahlan reportedly received help from CIA officials to train his security force to combat terrorism, which was one of Dahlan's primary responsibilities as head of the Preventive Security Service.

Jibril Rajoub is Mohammed Dahlan's sworn rival. Dahlan and Rajoub were both jailed by Israel during the first Intifada. Under Oslo they became heads of the Preventive Security Services in Gaza and the West Bank respectively. At that time they were both viewed as pragmatists, representative of a new generation of Palestinians who could live with Israel. Both Israel and the US groomed them as successors to Arafat. Both Dahlan and Rajoub were implicated in financial scandals and human rights violations.

For the next two years, Dahlan worked together with Israeli authorities to crack down on Hamas, arresting about 2,000 members in 1995 after receiving an order from Arafat. However, when Benjamin Netanyahu became Israel's Prime Minister, the cooperation based on the Oslo Accords of 1993 deteriorated and Dahlan attempted to distance himself from activities that seemed to be helping the Israelis.

In 2000, Dahlan participated in the Camp David negotiations, but the next few years brought conflict from all sides. With the beginning of the second intifada, Dahlan claimed that he was unable to stop the activities of such militant groups as Hamas. The relations with Israel unraveled, Dahlan became the target of Israeli attacks, both on his headquarters and on his personal motorcade. Dahlan reportedly resigned from his position as head of the Preventive Security Service in November 2001, but Arafat refused it.

In March and April 2002, Dahlan was one of the "Gang of Five" who lead the Palestinian Authority during the siege of Arafat's headquaraters in Ramallah. Although Arafat returned to power and named Dahlan as National Security Advisor in July 2002, Dahlan resigned three months later complaining of lack of authority and organization in the Palestinian Authority. Against Arafat's wishes, Mahmoud Abbas appointed Dahlan as Interior Minister, but when Abbas resigned, Dahlan was left outside the newly formed cabinet under Ahmed Qurei.

After being left out of the new Palestinian Authority cabinet, Dahlan began gathering support from low-level Fatah officialsand former Preventive Security Service officers in response to a perceived lack of democratic reforms among Fatah leaders. Mohammed Dahlan was thought by some to be behind much of the internecine violence in Gaza. He had often instructed Gaza's Preventive Security Service - whose new commander, Abu Shabak, is one of his loyalists - to engage in armed attacks against Arafat loyalists. Although Ahmed Qurei discussed the possibility of a cabinet reshuffling to include Dahlan, it has not yet taken place and Dahlan remains on tenuous terms with Arafat and other PA leadership.

Some called Dahlan the Palestinian Chalabi, because he reportedly negotiated with the US and Israel about taking control of Gaza after Israel pulled out. In April 2002 testimony before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer said he had offered control of the Gaza Strip to Dahlan. In exchange, Dahlan, who had control of the most significant military force on the Gaza Strip, would be obligated to ensure complete quiet along the border. Dahlan had the potential of becoming the leader who establishes orderly rule in the Gaza Strip, and who provided security.

On 26 July 2007, Dahlan cited health reasons for his resignation head of internal security in Gaza,, which was accepted on by Abbas. However, Palestinian government officials said Abbas asked him to step down because investigators concluded Dahlan bore much of the responsibility for the humiliating defeat of Fatah-aligned forces in mid-June. Dahlan had been heavily criticised within Abbas’s Fatah faction for the failure. He was not in Gaza when fighting broke out between the two factions. More than 100 people were killed in the conflict, while Dahlan was sidelined due to surgery on both knees. Dahlan acknowledged mistakes and said individuals, including himself, should take responsibility for their errors.

On 06 January 2010, Fatah Central Committee (FCC) member and former Preventive Security Organization Gaza chief Muhammad Dahlan noted that General that following the Fatah General Congress in August 2009, FCC members had been attending events throughout the West Bank in an effort to reactivate the grassroots. He said FCC members have attended rallies marking Fatah's anniversary in towns and villages during January, demonstrating that the FCC is active and engaged. Dahlan said FCC member Tawfiq Tirawi (former head of the General Intelligence service in the West Bank) is organizing elections for leadership positions in Fatah's unions and syndicates. Elections for the journalists syndicate will take place in February, he said, followed by unions, then student organizations. Dahlan said that he was working with FCC member Jamal Muhaysin to reach out to Fatah members in the Palestinian Diaspora, particularly in refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, and also in Egypt. He said FCC member Sakher Bseiso is considering a trip to Gaza in late January, to show Gazans that Fatah has not forgotten them.

He fled Ramallah in 2010, after being accused by his own party of corruption and a coup attempt. Dahlan was expelled from Fatah’s ruling body in 2011 on allegations of plotting to overthrow his former ally in Fatah, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and has been living in exile in the UAE since 2012. In 2016, a Palestinian court sentenced Dahlan in absentia to three years in prison for corruption and ordered him to repay $16m, according to his lawyers.

Dahlan then lived in the United Arab Emirates and become very close to the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammad bin Zayed. Although Dahlan began amassing wealth in Gaza before his exile in 2006, his fortune in the UAE grew exuberantly. When interviewing him in a report titled “In Muhammad Dahlan’s ascent, a proxy battle for legitimacy” for the New York Times in November 2016, Peter Baker couldn’t help but marvel at Dahlan’s wealth from the very first paragraph. “His spacious home here in Abu Dhabi … features plush sofas, vaulted ceilings and chandeliers. The infinity pool in the back seems to spill into the glistening waterway beyond,” Baker wrote.

In a move, engineered with the help and support of several Arab governments including Egypt, Dahlan managed to exploit the rift between Hamas and Fatah while presenting himself as the saviour of the dying Gaza Strip. “We have made mutual efforts with our brothers in Hamas to restore hope for Gaza’s heroic people,” Mohammed Dahlan told Palestinian legislators gathering in Gaza on 27 July 2017. He spoke via satellite from his current exile in the United Arab Emirates. The audience clapped. True, Gaza has been pushed to the brink of humiliation so that its people may lose hope. But the fact that it was Dahlan that uttered these words appeared odd. More bizarre is the fact that his audience included top members of Hamas.

Dahlan had failed repeatedly in the past, in subduing Gaza, in controlling the PA, in deposing an aging Abbas and in other plots, and this new gamble was no different.

On 23 November 2019 Turkey offered four million lira ($700,000) for information leading to the arrest of Mohammed Dahlan, a former official in the Palestinian Fatah party who lived in exile in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Ankara accused the 58-year-old of being a mercenary for the UAE and involved in a 2016 coup attempt against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu on Friday told the Hurriyet newspaper that Dahlan was placed on the “most-wanted terrorists list”, linking him to what Ankara calls the Gulenist Terror Group (FETO) and US-based Turkish businessman Fethullah Gulen. Ankara blames Gulen and his FETO movement for the coup attempt on July 15, 2016. Gulen denies involvement.

Dahlan responded vehemently in an interview with a Saudi broadcaster, accusing Erdogan of supporting “terrorist groups” in Syria, stealing gold from the Libyan central bank and “acting as if he were commander of the faithful”.

The Palestinian electoral commission announced approval of 36 candidate lists for the 22 May 2021 legislative polls, the first Palestinian polls in 15 years. Fatah faced challenges from dissident factions including the Freedom list, led by Nasser al-Kidwa, a nephew of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Freedom had been endorsed by Marwan Barghouti, a popular leader serving multiple life sentences in Israel for allegedly organising deadly attacks during the second Palestinian Intifada (uprising) from 2000-2005. Abbas’s former Gaza security chief, Mohammed Dahlan, currently in exile in Abu Dhabi, also backed a list of challengers. But on 30 April 2021 Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas "postponed" planned parliamentary elections next month amid a dispute over voting in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem and splits in his Fatah party.

By the end of 2023, Fatah still existed in Gaza, where it was in the opposition. Its supporters there were split between loyalty to Abbas and former Fatah leader Mohammed Dahlan, who has been in exile in the United Arab Emirates for 10 years,

Dahlan was courting the media. A recent proposal for a two-year transitional government of technocrats in Gaza and the West Bank raised questions over whether he might make a play for the leadership.

"It is the international community who decided that Mahmoud Abbas would remain in power without elections. Israel, the USA and the West. They decided on our behalf. When Israel and Abbas rejected elections under the pretext of Jerusalem, they wanted to deepen corruption, deepen the division between the West Bank and Gaza, and further the occupation. This theory failed after Oct. 7, and whoever wants to repeat the same mistakes will have to bear future consequences....

"A person who is not controversial is not useful, that is my view. Secondly, with regard to the relationship I have built over the past years, I think I have a good relationship with all factions. I have a relationship with civil society, I have a relationship with Hamas, with the [Islamic] Jihad, with the Popular Front, with all organizations. "