Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has acknowledged that Israel is providing support to an armed group in Gaza that stands against the militant organisation Hamas, following statements from a former minister regarding Israel’s transfer of weapons to this group.
Reports from both Israeli and Palestinian news sources indicate that the group Israel has been collaborating with is associated with a local Bedouin tribe led by Yasser Abu Shabab.
The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) think tank characterises Abu Shabab as the head of a “criminal gang operating in the Rafah area, widely accused of plundering aid trucks.”
Knesset member and former defence minister Avigdor Liberman stated on the Kan public broadcaster that the government, under Netanyahu’s orders, was “supplying weapons to a group of criminals and felons.”
Michael Milshtein, a specialist in Palestinian issues at the Moshe Dayan Centre in Tel Aviv, informed AFP that the Abu Shabab clan is part of a Bedouin tribe that extends across the border between Gaza and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
He pointed out that some individuals from the tribe have been engaged in “various criminal activities, drug trafficking, and the like.” He mentioned that Hamas had killed four members of this gang just days ago. The ECFR noted that Abu Shabab was “reportedly previously imprisoned by Hamas due to drug smuggling, and his brother is said to have been killed by Hamas during a crackdown on the group’s attacks on UN aid convoys.”
Israel consistently accuses Hamas, with which it has been in conflict for nearly 20 months, of seizing aid convoys in Gaza. Hamas claimed that the group had “chosen treachery and theft as their course” and urged civilians to resist them.
Having governed Gaza for almost two decades, Hamas asserted that it possesses proof of clear coordination between these looting gangs, collaborators with the occupation (Israel), and the enemy army itself in the theft of aid and the creation of humanitarian crises that worsen the suffering of Palestinians.
