Anger and mistrust in Gaza as Hamas hunts for Israel ‘collaborators’

Abdullah al-Nashar does not have a tombstone. His grave is a smear of concrete with his name roughly written into it marked with a breeze block. It is an ignominious memorial for a man who served as a presidential guard for both Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas.

But Nashar is no longer considered a Palestinian hero. On May 25th he was one of three men publicly executed for the crime of helping Israel assassinate the Hamas military chief Mazen Fuqha. And in Gaza, this is the only suitable grave for a collaborator.

Standing at his graveside in Sheikh Radwan cemetery, his brothers Mohammed and Khaled al-Nashar are still angry. They are convinced he was killed for a crime he did not commit.

“It was crazy, what happened. It was a fake court to show the world that there was a trial, with lawyers, prosecution, and sessions. None of it was real,” Mohammed said.

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“[Hamas] wanted to wrap up the story. It had become a matter of public interest and they wanted to show there was progress. The progress was to execute the three of them. They made it an action movie,” he said.

Between their arrest and execution, Nashar, Ashraf Abu Leila and Hisham al-Aloul were not granted legal representation nor were human rights groups granted access to them in prison.

The man they were accused of helping to kill was shot at point-blank range using a gun fitted with a silencer in the garage of his home in Gaza City in March. Such a close-quarters, high-profile assassination inside Gaza is unusual – and audacious. Hamas took the unprecedented step of sealing its own borders and setting checkpoints up across Gaza as it hunted the culprits.

Israeli surveillance

Israel has officially denied the Hamas claim that it was responsible for the killing. But it has previously assassinated senior militants from the air and Israel has without doubt recruited collaborators in the territory.

Since Hamas took control of the region in 2007, Gaza has been subject to exceptionally close cyber and electronic surveillance by Israel. But there are gaps in technological capabilities – particularly in the "liquidation" of senior militant targets – that only well-placed human intelligence agents can fill, said Reuven Berko, a retired colonel in the Israeli military who oversaw collaborators in Gaza before Israel's withdrawal. Berko said Nashar was not an Israeli agent, but that the risk collaborators ran was real.

“Of course the enemy is always busy looking for these sources,” he said.

Without access to the criminal evidence Hamas gathered against Nashar, there can be no independent assessment of the case against him – nor his family’s claim that he was falsely accused.

Since the 2014 war, Hamas has run a major campaign against the internal threat posed by collaborators. Following Fuqha’s death, 45 people were arrested on charges of collaboration. Eyad al-Bosom, the spokesman for Gaza’s ministry of interior, said Hamas was confident there were now only tens of active informers in Gaza.

“The prominent culture in our society is that [Israel] is an enemy, an occupation. It killed our people and displaced us. The prominent culture is to reject collaboration and dealing with this enemy,” Bosom said.

But while Hamas relies on stigma and violent deterrence, Israel has total control over the movement of Gaza's people. Particularly now the Rafah crossing into Egypt has been almost completely shut by the Hamas-hostile Sisi administration, Palestinians can only travel to and from Gaza with Israeli permission.

NGOs including legal aid organisation Gisha and Physicians for Human Rights assist Palestinians in the application process for permits to leave Gaza. They say Palestinians are routinely approached by Israeli security officers offering permission to receive urgent medical care or access to family in exchange for information.

"We don't have numbers on how many people are being approached, you can imagine that's not something that's widely shared. We do know that in cases we're trying to push through the system, that many people are invited to what's called a security interview and asked for all kinds of information," said Tania Hary, the director of Gisha.

‘False confession’

Before the executions in May, Hamas released a slick propaganda video explaining how the Fuqha assassination was carried out.

Filmed in shadows, a man who is apparently Nashar says he was recruited by an Israeli intelligence agent purporting to be an NGO worker who could help him get a permit to visit his wife in Jerusalem. He admits to providing reconnaissance on Fuqha's home before the hit.

His brothers claim this was a false confession, the result of torture. And, they argue that even if he were guilty of the role he confessed to, providing information on the scene of an assassination is not grounds for execution.

Whether or not Nashar provided information to Israeli intelligence agents or not, Berko says many others have been recruited by the means described in the Hamas video.

“The motive can be a vast arrange of needs, of weaknesses, or an understanding that the situation needs fixing … sometimes we even have to create this motive for him,” Berko said.

Guardian service