The Palestinian Authority’s Sham Investigation of the Murder of Regime Critic Nizar Banat

We all know the story of how the Saudi Crown Prince got rid of a thorn in his side, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, by having him murdered. We are full of indignation, especially about the grisly details about his dismemberment. But how many of us remember how Mahmoud Abbas, no slouch at murder, got rid of his own bête noire, the Palestinian Nizar Banat, who on social media proved to be so keen a critic of Mahmoud Abbas, especially on the sore subject of his massive corruption, that Abbas decided, like the Crown Prince with Khashoggi, to rid himself of Banat once and for all. In June 2021, a group of Abbas’ goons picked up Banat from his brother’s house, where he had been hiding, and within an hour of making off with him, they had beaten him to death.

Let’s remember why, and how, Nizar Banat was murdered. The circumstances were these:

Mahmoud Abbas is now in the seventeenth year of his four-year term as President-For-Life of the Palestinian Authority. Famously corrupt, he has managed while in office to amass, with his two sons Yasser and Tareq, a fortune of $400 million.

Early in 2021, he decided to call for Presidential and Parliamentary elections, under the misapprehension that he might actually win. Soon enough, public opinion polls revealed that any of Abbas’ opponents, whether Marwan Barghouti, or Mohammed Dahlan, or a candidate put up by Hamas, would win 60% of the vote in a contest with Abbas.

Abbas then decided that elections were a bad idea, and he cancelled them, on the pretext that Israel would not allow Palestinian Arabs in East Jerusalem to take part in the vote. It was a specious charge: Israel had already said the Palestinian Arabs could take part in such an election, as long as they cast their ballots in one of the villages just outside East Jerusalem, and not in East Jerusalem itself.

Abbas’ excuse did not mollify his Palestinian critics; they realized that yet again he was going to refuse to put himself to the electoral test, in order to continue his long reign of mismanagement and corruption. More and more Palestinians in the West Bank have become critics of Abbas, spreading the word on social media about his corruption and despotic ways.

The most biting and effective critic of all was Nizar Banat of Dura, near Hebron. He was well known for his caustically sarcastic videos criticizing the Palestinian leadership for corruption and fraud. His Facebook page had over 100,000 followers.

Abbas’ goons in the PA security forces have frequently rounded up and detained on trumped-up charges critics of his regime. Some of them die while in custody, from various “mysterious ailments” that remain vague and un-investigated. But Banat’s death was the first that has taken place in the presence of family members, who witnessed the fatal beating administered to him in his uncle’s home, where he had been hiding, in the middle of the night. More details are here:

In a statement confirming Banat’s death, Hebron Governor Jibrin al-Bakri said that a unit of the PA security forces had entered a house where Banat was hiding with a warrant for his arrest.

During [his arrest] his medical condition deteriorated, and he was immediately referred to the Hebron public hospital for treatment. Doctors at the scene who examined him found he was dead,” Bakri said.

According to al-Bakri, the PA public prosecutor’s office had already opened an investigation into Banat’s death.

In the middle of the night, 20 men entered his relative’s house, beat Banat with iron bars, stripped him naked, and then continued to beat him ferociously until he was dead. What is there for the PA’s office of the public prosecutor going to investigate? Won’t its real task be to claim that Banat had a pre-existing medical condition that explained his death, and above all, that investigation must distance Mahmoud Abbas from any conceivable link to the murderers?

Yes, as it has always done in the past, the PA promised to set up a “committee” to investigate Banat’s death. What needed to be investigated? Twenty members of the PA police were sent to administer a savage beating to Banat; they did as ordered, using metal bars, and as one might have predicted, Nizar Banat died.

All this talk about appointing a “committee to investigate Banat’s death” was simply to mollify the public, to pretend that such a savage beating was not ordered from the very top, but was undertaken by “rogue” officers who were not authorized to behave as they did. There were some Palestinians who accepted this explanation, but not very many.