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Armed militia members are serving as Israeli agents in Gaza: Investigation
Al Jazeera is set to release a new investigation on armed groups in Gaza accused of collaborating with the Israeli military against Palestinians, detailing their names, movements and training locations, as Israel’s genocidal war on the enclave continues unabated.
The investigation, a new episode of the programme What is Hidden is Greater, by Al Jazeera journalist Tamer Almisshal, will be broadcast at 9pm in Doha (18:00 GMT) on Friday. It includes audio and video material that the network says documents how individuals inside Gaza were recruited and operated.
The investigation reveals how the armed groups have been moving freely from northern to southern Gaza behind the so-called “yellow line” – the self-proclaimed demarcation line, effectively a buffer zone, where the Israeli army is entrenched under the first phase of the Gaza “ceasefire” that came into effect in October.
Israel has repeatedly violated the “ceasefire” on a near-daily basis, killing more than 525 Palestinians.Israeli military maps indicate the line extends 1.5km and 6.5km (0.9 to 4 miles) inside Gaza from its eastern boundary with Israel and covers roughly 58 percent of the enclave.
According to the investigation, these armed groups face multiple accusations of collaborating with the Israeli occupation, amid growing evidence that they move within areas prohibited to Palestinians under the ceasefire agreement, allegations that some of these groups have publicly denied.
Last June, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly admitted the country was using armed gangs in the devastated coastal enclave to help fight Hamas, the ruling entity in Gaza.
Netanyahu said the government had “activated” powerful local clans in the enclave on the advice of “security officials”.
A Palestinian woman returning to Gaza through the partially opened Rafah crossing this week told the Reuters news agency that she, along with other women, was stopped at a checkpoint manned by Israel-backed Palestinian gunmen who identified themselves as belonging to the Popular Forces, commonly known as the Abu Shabab militia.
The women’s family names were read out over a loudspeaker, and each was led by two men and a woman from Abu Shabab militia to a security point where Israeli forces were waiting. They were then subjected to full body searches, blindfolded and handcuffed, she said, and interrogated about the Hamas-led October 7 attack in southern Israel.
Elderly Palestinians determined to stay in Gaza despite terrible conditions
The Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt has finally partially opened this week after two years of Israeli-mandated closure. The news offers relief for many – particularly those Palestinians in urgent need of treatment abroad.
But for many elderly Palestinians in Gaza, staying in the enclave is an act of survival, resistance, and historical memory. Rafah may be open, but they are not planning to go anywhere.
In Kefaya al-Assar’s mind, that decision to stay is an effort to correct what she perceives to have been a historical mistake made by her parents – fleeing their village of Julis, which was depopulated in the 1948 Nakba, and is now within Israel.
“We blamed [our parents] a lot for leaving our home there,” said the 73-year-old Kefaya.
Kefaya has faced displacement during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza five times. Originally from Jabalia in northern Gaza, she now shelters in a classroom at a school in central Gaza’s Nuseirat.
Widowed in early 2023 and without children, she said displacement revives the trauma she inherited from her parents. “History repeats itself now,” she said. “My parents lost all their money when they were forced to flee. We also used to have money, but now we are displaced and have lost everything.”
When Kefaya was a child, her family lived in tents in Gaza’s refugee camps, before they became more permanent structures in later decades. Now, she says that she is reliving that same fate.
“I don’t want to repeat history, I want to die in my own country,” she said. “Even here, being in Nuseirat, I feel like a stranger. I wish I could go back to Jabalia.”
