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The Palestinian Authority: Structure, Powers, and Real Limitations

When the Palestinian Authority was inaugurated in 1994, it was presented to the world — and to many Palestinians — as a stepping stone. An interim body, created by the Oslo Accords, that would govern Palestinian life for five years while a final-status agreement was negotiated. Thirty years later, the PA remains. The final-status agreement does not. What endures instead is a governing structure whose powers are real in some places, nominal in others, and everywhere constrained by arrangements that were never meant to be permanent.

Understanding what the Palestinian Authority actually controls — and what controls it — is not a footnote to the Palestinian story. It is close to the center of it.

Built by Oslo: What the Accords Actually Created

The PA was established through the 1993 Declaration of Principles and given concrete form in the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, commonly called Oslo II. That agreement divided the occupied West Bank into three administrative zones whose boundaries were drawn not by population logic or Palestinian need, but by negotiation.

Area A — covering the major Palestinian cities including Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Jericho, and most of Hebron — was placed under full Palestinian civil and security control. It amounts to roughly 18 percent of the West Bank and contains the majority of the Palestinian urban population.

Area B covers Palestinian towns and villages where the PA holds civil authority but shares security responsibility with Israel. Israel retains what the agreement calls “overriding security authority,” a phrase with significant practical consequences. Area B is approximately 22 percent of the West Bank.

Area C — some 60 percent of the West Bank — remains under full Israeli civil and military control. It includes virtually all of the Jordan Valley, the land surrounding Israeli settlements, and the contiguous open territory that would form the geographic backbone of any viable Palestinian state. The PA has no administrative authority there. Palestinians who live in Area C, or whose villages sit adjacent to it, require Israeli approval for construction, infrastructure, and land use — approval that, as documented extensively by OCHA oPt and Bimkom, is routinely denied.

Gaza was initially included in this framework. After Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections — the last elections held — and took full control of Gaza in 2007, the PA’s geographic authority shrank to the West Bank alone.

The Fiscal Leash: How Israel Controls the PA Budget

The PA does not collect most of its own tax revenue. Under the Paris Protocol, the economic annex to Oslo signed in 1994, Israel collects customs duties, VAT, and other taxes on goods entering through Israeli ports and crossings on the PA’s behalf, then transfers those funds — known as clearance revenues — to the PA treasury. These transfers routinely account for between 60 and 70 percent of total PA revenues, according to figures published by the Palestinian Ministry of Finance and tracked by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

The arrangement has, on multiple occasions, been converted into explicit financial coercion. Israel has withheld clearance revenues as a political instrument: in 2019 and 2020, following a PA decision to stop accepting transfers after Israel announced it would deduct funds the PA pays to families of prisoners and those killed by Israeli forces, the standoff froze hundreds of millions of dollars and triggered a documented fiscal crisis. The World Bank and IMF have both flagged the structural vulnerability this dependency creates.

The result is a governing authority whose budget is partially controlled by the occupying power it nominally opposes — a dynamic that shapes not only the PA’s finances but its political maneuvering room.

Security Coordination: The Most Contested Function

Of all the PA’s roles, none draws sharper criticism from Palestinians than security coordination with Israeli military and intelligence services. Under Oslo’s framework, Palestinian security forces in Area A are obligated to prevent attacks on Israelis and to cooperate with Israeli forces on what the agreements term “terrorist” threats. In practice, this has meant Palestinian Authority intelligence sharing Israeli arrest targets, PA forces detaining individuals at Israeli request, and joint operations in which Palestinian security personnel act, in effect, as a sub-contracted layer of occupation enforcement.

Palestinian pollsters have recorded consistent and deep public opposition to this function. A 2023 survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that more than 80 percent of Palestinian respondents favored ending security coordination with Israel. Critics — including human rights organizations and Palestinian civil society groups — argue that coordination has involved the PA detaining journalists, political activists, and members of rival factions in ways that serve Israeli security preferences rather than Palestinian law or political legitimacy.

Defenders of coordination, including PA officials and some international donors who fund the Palestinian security sector, argue that the alternative is direct Israeli military reoccupation of Area A cities. That argument has force. It also illustrates the core dilemma: the PA’s authority in Area A rests partly on Israeli tolerance of that authority, and that tolerance is conditioned on security behavior Israel finds acceptable.

Mahmoud Abbas and the Democratic Deficit

Mahmoud Abbas was elected President of the Palestinian Authority in January 2005, winning 62 percent of the vote in an election judged broadly legitimate by international observers. His four-year term was due to expire in January 2009. He has governed by presidential decree since. Legislative elections scheduled for 2021 were cancelled — Abbas cited Israeli refusal to permit voting in East Jerusalem, though critics noted additional political calculations at play. The Palestinian Legislative Council has not met in any functional sense since 2007.

The consequence is a governance structure that has accumulated significant authoritarian characteristics. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented PA suppression of protests, arbitrary detention of critics, and restrictions on press freedom. The PA operates without a functioning legislature, without a recent electoral mandate, and without a clear succession mechanism — a democratic deficit that weakens its claim to represent Palestinian interests precisely at the moment when those interests are most urgently in need of representation.

What the PA Is, and What It Cannot Be

The Palestinian Authority governs the daily lives of millions of people. It runs schools, hospitals, courts, and civil registration offices. Its police respond to crime. Its ministries issue permits. For Palestinians in Area A cities, it is the immediate face of governance in a way that is neither trivial nor easily replaced.

But it does not control borders, airspace, electromagnetic spectrum, or water. It cannot build in Area C without Israeli permission. Its revenues are held, partly, in Israeli hands. Its security forces operate within constraints set by an occupying power. It has not been elected in nearly two decades.

The scholar Rashid Khalidi, in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, describes Oslo as having created “a Palestinian security subcontractor for the occupation.” That characterization is contested, but the structural facts that animate it are not. The PA was designed as a transitional instrument. What was never designed — and what Oslo’s architects did not resolve — was what it would transition to, or when, or how. Palestinians living under its authority, and under the occupation it partially administers, are still waiting for that answer.

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