Jerusalem: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted that Israel is supporting an armed group in Gaza who opposes Hamas, after the comments of a former minister that Israel had transferred weapons.
Israeli and Palestinian media have reported that the group with which Israel has been working is part of a local Beduine tribe directed by Yasser Abu Shabab.
The group of experts from the European Board of Foreign Affairs (EFCR) describes Abu Shabab as the leader of a “criminal gang that operates in the Rafah area that is widely accused of looting help trucks.”
Member of the KNESET and former Minister of Defense, Avigdor Liberman, had told him to Khan Public slope that the government, in the direction of Netanyahu, was “giving weapons to a group of criminals and criminals.”
The attire of the popular forces denies being ‘a tool of occupation’
“What leaked Liberman? That security sources activated a Clan in Gaza that opposes Hamas? What’s wrong with that?” Netanyahu said in a video posted on social networks on Thursday.
Michael Milshtein, an expert in Palestinian affairs at the Moshe Dayan Center in Tel Aviv, said AFP That the ABU Shabab clan was part of a Beduine tribe that extends through the border between Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt.
Some of the tribe members, he said, participated in “all kinds of criminal activities, smuggling of drugs and things like that.”
‘Gangster’
Milshtein said that Abu Shabab had spent time in prison in Gaza and that his clan bosses had recently denounced him as an “Israeli collaborator and a gangster.”
“It seems that in reality the shabak (Israeli security agency) or the (military) thought it was a wonderful idea to convert this militia, a gang actually, in one power, give them weapons, money and refuge” of the army’s operations, said Milshtein.
He said Hamas killed four gang members days ago.
The ECFR said that Abu Shabab was “informed of Hamas previously imprisoned by Hamas for drug smuggling. It is said that his brother was killed by Hamas during a repression against the group’s attacks against the UN convoys of help.”
Hamas said the group had “chosen betrayal and robbery as their way” and called on civilians to oppose them.
Hamas, who has ruled Gaza for almost two decades, said he had evidence of “a clear coordination between these looting gangs, collaborators with the occupation (Israel) and the enemy army in the looting of the aid and the manufacture of humanitarian crises that deepen the suffering of the” Palestinians.
The popular forces, as the Abu Shabab group is called, on Facebook that “it had never been, and that will never be, a tool of occupation.” “Our weapons are simple, outdated and obtained the support of our own people.”
Milshtein called Israel’s decision to assemble the group “A fantasy, not something you can really describe as a strategy.”
Posted in Dawn, June 7, 2025
