Most Western news outlets are now focusing almost exclusively on the fate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Few are paying attention to the details of Assange’s rape allegations in Sweden, which have sparked an interesting —though limited— debate about possible links between Assange’s accusers and American intelligence. Even fewer are paying attention to the actual US diplomatic cable revelations by WikiLeaks, which keep appearing daily, mostly in British quality broadsheet The Guardian (The New York Times has largely lost interest at this point). One such revelation, published on Monday, concerns allegations by the Director of the Shabat, also known as Shin Bet (Israel’s internal security service), that Palestinian group Fatah asked Israel to attack rival Palestinian group Hamas, in 2007. The leaked cable claims Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin told US diplomats that Fatah, the secular Palestinian nationalist faction that controls the West Bank, was “demoralized” and “desperate” to halt the rapid rise of Islamic Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. Diskin further told US officials that Fatah understood it could only survive with Israeli support, and had thus directly “asked us [Israel] to attack Hamas”. Perhaps more importantly, the leaked cable appears to confirm intense speculation among some intelligence observers that Fatah is “actively gathering information on behalf of Israeli intelligence”. Specifically, Diskin told US diplomats that Fatah’s security force maintains a “very good working relationship” with Israeli intelligence and shares with Shin Bet “almost all the intelligence that it collects”. This disclosure appears to confirm allegations made last April by Hamas official Mohammed Nazal, who said that Fatah Central Committee member Mohammed Dahlan, leader of Fatah’s security service, was actively gathering information on behalf of Israeli intelligence. The latest WikiLeaks disclosures are some of the very few concerning Israel that have been released so far by the whistleblower website.
source: https://intelligencenews.wordpress.com/2010/12/22/01-619/
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