Weekly Briefing: Israel is arming militias to prevent Palestinian governance in Gaza

This week, our Gaza Correspondent, Tareq Hajjaj, filed an exclusive story looking at the ongoing fight between Hamas and Israeli-armed opposition groups.

Israel’s strategy is to ensure that no Palestinian governing authority in Gaza can survive, and then argue that the only alternative to Israeli control is chaos. Tareq’s report, based on interviews with Hamas security leaders and police officers inside Gaza, reveals the systematic arming of militia groups designed to fill the security vacuum that Israeli strikes on Palestinian police are deliberately creating.

Tareq has reported on this pattern since last June. Israel targets uniformed security personnel, forcing Hamas’s police forces underground and thinning their ranks through sustained attrition, while simultaneously arming and supporting militia groups operating in the eastern sectors of Gaza under direct Israeli military control. These groups, which carry names like the “Popular Forces” and the “Anti-Terror Strike Force,” exist to manufacture destabilization by looting aid, facilitating forced displacement, and projecting Israeli power into areas where Israeli soldiers cannot operate without attracting international attention. Militias were executing a strategy developed in coordination with the Israeli military when they drove a convoy through Hamas-controlled Khan Younis on April 20, declaring “Hamas is over.”

Understanding this requires placing it alongside everything else Israel has constructed in Gaza since the nominal ceasefire began, including the so-called Board of Peace, the humanitarian aid channels built outside the United Nations infrastructure that has historically governed such operations, and the obliteration or erosion of any institution through which Palestinians might govern themselves. If no Palestinian governing authority is permitted to function, if aid flows only through channels Israel controls, and if the streets are contested by armed groups loyal to the occupation, then Israel’s continued presence in Gaza appears necessary rather than imposed — which is precisely the point. Israel’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza requires the destruction of Palestinian political and civil life and the manufacture of conditions that make permanent occupation look like the only available option.

Tareq has reported on this story previously for Mondoweiss: the Hamas unit established to fight the gangs in June, the announced crackdowns in October, and the killing of militia leader Yasser Abu Shabab in December. His reporting is essential for anyone who wants to understand what is actually happening in Gaza beneath the headlines found in mainstream media.

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