JERUSALEM: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted that Israel is supporting an armed group in Gaza that opposes Hamas, following comments by a former minister that Israel had transferred weapons to it.

Israeli and Palestinian media have reported that the group Israel has been working with is part of a local Bedouin tribe led by Yasser Abu Shabab.

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

Knesset member and former defence minister Avigdor Liberman had told the Kan public broadcaster that the government, at Netanyahu’s direction, was “giving weapons to a group of criminals and felons”.

Popular Forces outfit denies being ‘a tool of the occupation’

“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.

Michael Milshtein, an expert on Palestinian affairs at the Moshe Dayan Centre 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 claimed 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”.

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.”

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

Published in Dawn, June 7th, 2025

Opinion

Editorial

Uneasy calm
25 Jun, 2025

Uneasy calm

AFTER several days of dangerous escalation in the Middle East, matters seem to be cooling off. The US-Israeli...
Judicial extensions
25 Jun, 2025

Judicial extensions

WITH the public’s attention on the rapidly deteriorating situation in the Middle East, the Judicial Commission of...
Asia on edge
25 Jun, 2025

Asia on edge

THE World Meteorological Organisation’s State of the Climate in Asia 2024 report lays bare the continent’s...
Agriculture concerns
24 Jun, 2025

Agriculture concerns

PRIME Minister Shehbaz Sharif appears relieved that the IMF did not turn down Pakistan’s request to exempt...
OIC reaction
Updated 24 Jun, 2025

OIC reaction

The bare minimum OIC can do is to take firm action against the butchery of Palestinian people and resist regime change.
NEVs, but for whom?
24 Jun, 2025

NEVs, but for whom?

THE government’s policy gymnastics following Pakistan’s unexpectedly rapid adoption of rooftop solar have ...