Palestinian Resistance Movement, Hamas fighters executed several alleged “collaborators” in the Gaza Strip, according to a video shared by popular online media channel Gaza Now.
Gaza Now, which boasts 1.7 million followers on Telegram, publishes a video showing more than a dozen Hamas operatives, many of them in uniform, opening fire on three men lying on the ground. The video is captioned “The moment of punishing the agents of the Zionist occupation who caused the killing of thousands of our Palestinian people in Gaza.”
The video could not immediately be verified. Hamas has regularly issued death sentences for people found guilty of “collaboration” with Israel, executing dozens of Palestinians in recent years.
In 2017, The accused Palestinians - aged 32, 42 and 55 - were hanged after being convicted by a court of treason and conspiring with foreign parties. They had been believed to have been arrested between six months to a year ago. The executions come as Hamas investigates the killing of a senior fighter, Mazen Fuqaha. It had accused Israel and local collaborators.
Human Rights Watch condemned those executions as "abhorrent" and warned Hamas that they projected "weakness, not strength". "Hamas authorities will never achieve true security or stability through firing squads or by the gallows, but rather through respect for international norms and the rule of law," said Sarah Leah Whitson, the US-based group's Middle East director.
Funding shortages may affect the UN’s ability to maintain aid flows at target levels throughout the Gaza ceasefire deal, a UN official told Reuters. Fifteen months of Israel’s war has left more than 47,000 Palestinians dead and most of Gaza in ruins, with hundreds of thousands of people homeless and reliant on outside aid for survival.
Daily deliveries have surged tenfold since the Sunday deal, according to UN data, surpassing the 600 trucks a day target set out for the first seven weeks of the ceasefire. Muhannad Hadi, Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, told Reuters late on Thursday he was “very happy” with how the first few days had gone, but flagged funding as a concern.
“Funding is an issue. We need immediate funding to make sure that we continue providing the aid for the 42 days, but also after the 42 days, because we’re hopeful that we’ll go from phase one to phase two,” he said, after returning from Gaza earlier this week.
He described scenes of widespread joy and relief across the enclave, with many Gazans smiling and eager to return to the remnants of their homes and find work. “I’ve received clear messages from the people: they don’t want to continue depending on humanitarian aid. They want to rebuild their lives... We can’t afford to let them down.”
