The PA prime minister Muhammad Shtayyeh is very happy that people are dying, because that has "returned the Palestinian issue to the agenda of the world's priorities."
This is important to understand. Since the Abraham Accords, Palestinians have been feeling irrelevant - the worst feeling for them.
They felt that the world no longer cared about them - which is largely true since they couldn't even fix their own issues and kept blaming everything on Israel. The Arab world has been sick and tired of the Palestinian issue for years, unless it helps their own political agendas.
Instead of working towards peace, the Palestinian Authority wanted to feel important, to be cover stories in Time magazine and the New York Times.
As Palestinian Media Watch has documented, the PA has worked to incite violence in Jerusalem for weeks before Ramadan. TV music videos glorified martyrdom. They know this stuff works on heir people. Sure enough, it did - starting with the TikTok attacks on religious Jews.
So they again started the "cycle of violence," quite consciously. And this led up to rockets and bombing Gaza - which, interestingly, doesn't hurt the Palestinian Authority one bit.
Now that they easily manipulated the anti-Israel media and politicians to condemn Israel for imagined crimes of "ethnic cleansing #SheikhJarrah" and "targeting civilians in Gaza," they are ecstatic.
How does it help them?
It doesn't. But Palestinians live in a zero sum game world, and they literally believe that anything that hurts Israel helps them.
It is a caveman mentality. The UAE doesn't have it, but many Arabs do - when Israel looks bad, somehow that helps its enemies.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh actually bragged that his rockets managed to disrupt some Yom Yerushalayim celebrations.
It would be a pathetic joke if it didn’t mean that Hamas and other Palestinian groups want to kill Jews to feel relevant. Much better to feel important than to feel impotent.
There are no winners in such a worldview. And until Palestinians realize that Israelis feeling secure is a prerequisite to peace, there will be none.