‘Saving lives of soldiers’: Netanyahu confirms Israeli support for armed group opposing Hamas in Gaza

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged that Israel is aiding an armed organisation in Gaza that opposes Hamas, following remarks by a former minister that Israel has provided weaponry to the group.

According to Israeli and Palestinian media, the group Israel has been collaborating with is a member of a Bedouin tribe in the area that is headed by Yasser Abu Shabab.

The leader of a “criminal gang operating in the Rafah area that is widely accused of looting aid trucks” is Abu Shabab, according to the European Council on Foreign Relations (EFCR) research tank.

Avigdor Liberman, a former defence minister and member of the Knesset, had warned the Kan public television that the government was “giving weapons to a group of criminals and felons” under Netanyahu’s leadership.

“What did Liberman leak? That security sources activated a clan in Gaza that opposes Hamas? What is bad about that?” Netanyahu said in a video posted to social media on Thursday.

“It is only good, it is saving lives of Israeli soldiers.”

Michael Milshtein, an expert on Palestinian affairs at the Moshe Dayan Center in Tel Aviv, told AFP that the Abu Shabab clan was part of a Bedouin tribe that spans across the border between Gaza and Egypt’s Sinai peninsula.

Some of the tribe’s members, he said, were involved in “all kinds of criminal activities, drug smuggling, and things like that”.

‘Gangster’

Milshtein said that Abu Shabab had spent time in prison in Gaza and that his clan chiefs had recently denounced him as an Israeli “collaborator and a gangster”.

“It seems that actually the Shabak (Israeli security agency) or the (military) thought it was a wonderful idea to turn this militia, gang actually, into a proxy, to give them weapons and money and shelter” from army operations, Milshtein said.

He added that Hamas killed four members of the gang days ago.

The ECFR said Abu Shabab was “reported to have been previously jailed by Hamas for drug smuggling. His brother is said to have been killed by Hamas during a crackdown against the group’s attacks on UN aid convoys.”

Israel regularly accuses Hamas, with which it has been at war for nearly 20 months, of looting aid convoys in Gaza.

Hamas said the group had “chosen betrayal and theft as their path” and called on civilians to oppose them.

Hamas, which has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, said it had evidence of “clear coordination between these looting gangs, collaborators with the occupation (Israel), and the enemy army itself in the looting of aid and the fabrication of humanitarian crises that deepen the suffering of” Palestinians.

The Popular Forces, as Abu Shabab’s group calls itself, said on Facebook it had “never been, and will never be, a tool of the occupation”.

“Our weapons are simple, outdated, and came through the support of our own people,” it added.

Milshtein called Israel’s decision to arm a group such as Abu Shabab “a fantasy, not something that you can really describe as a strategy”.

“I really hope it will not end with catastrophe,” he said.