AMMAN, Jordan – When Israel and Hamas signed a ceasefire earlier this year, it brought into question the fate of militias Israel cultivated during the devastating two-year war as an option ruling force in Gaza. Many expected that hamas – still the dominant force in the Strip – would hunt them down.
Instead,Israel has shifted the militias to the half of Gaza from which it has yet to withdraw,east of the so-called Yellow Line,the military boundary which divides Gaza in two. In the Israeli-controlled half, five factions, still supported by Israel with arms and aid, have established what are essentially tiny fiefdoms, even as they continue to wage a harassment campaign across the Yellow Line to stop Hamas from reasserting its rule.
For its part, Israel wants to use the factions as local proxies to secure parts of the enclave under its control, ensure they’re free of any hostile groups, then set up humanitarian distribution points to keep residents there.
“The objective,” according to a June report on Israeli-supported militias in Gaza from the Institute for National security Studies in Tel Aviv, “is to sever Hamas’s access to both the local population and to the incoming humanitarian aid.”
But the militias, which first arose as criminal gangs exploiting the security vacuum during the war and include members with questionable links to Islamic State, have larger plans: They tout themselves as an integral part of any post-conflict plan.
“After two years of destruction by Hamas, we are the nucleus of a new Gaza, one which will provide a dignified life for Gazan citizens,” said hussam Al-Astal, the head of one faction called Strike Force Against Terror and which controls a mostly depopulated village southwest of the southern Gazan city of Khan Yunis. He said Israel is working with five different factions operating across the Israeli-controlled parts of the enclave.
he added that he has hundreds of militiamen under his command,contradicting observers who put the total number of fighters across the five groups at around 200.
“Israel is now looking for a peace partner in Gaza,” Al-Astal said. “that’s what we will be.”
The largest of the factions working with Israel is the so-called Popular Forces, which was led until recently by Yasser Abu shabab, a 32-year-old clansman who was imprisoned twice by Hamas before the war on charges of drug trafficking; and known to have ties to Islamic State in neighboring Sinai. He escaped from a Hamas prison during the war.
Abu Shabab, who was regularly accused by humanitarian groups of looting aid trucks, was assassinated this month by disgruntled members of his militia, according to a statement from Abu Shabab’s clan.
He was soon replaced by his deputy, Ghassan Al-Duhini, 39, a no less controversial figure who once served as a security officer with the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, then left it to join Jaysh al-Islam, a Gaza-based armed faction that pledged allegiance to Islamic State in 2015.
Al-Duhini reportedly coordinated smuggling with militant groups in Sinai. He too was arrested twice by Hamas before the war and escaped when it began.
As the ceasefire, Israel has been working thru the Popular Forces as its proxy in Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip which was all but destroyed during the war, razed by Israeli forces.
The city now lies mostly empty. but the U.S.-led Civilian-Military Coordination center (the body supposed to monitor the ceasefire, coordinate aid deliveries and start reconstruction in the enclave) is considering Rafah as a pilot for a Hamas-free, so-called “alternative safe community” of some 10,000 to 15,000 peopel, according to a U.N. official and an aid worker who refused to be named to be able to speak freely.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Ma