NEW YORK CITY: A investigation this week by the newspaper Haaretz revived scrutiny of a network of armed Palestinian militias that operate in Israeli-controlled parts of Gaza with weapons, funding and protection provided by the Israeli military.
The origins of the militia project can be traced to the early months of Israel’s Rafah offensive in May 2024, when a small armed group calling itself the Popular Forces began operating in areas under Israeli control in southern Gaza.
Its leader, Yasser Abu Shabab, was a member of the Bedouin Abu Shabab clan who in October 2023 escaped from a Hamas prison where he was serving time on theft and drug-trafficking charges.
The role of Israeli authorities in arming the group was not publicly acknowledged until June 2025, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that “on the advice of security officials, we activated clans in Gaza that oppose Hamas.”
Abu Shabab had been publicly disavowed by his Tarabin tribe months earlier over his cooperation with Israel, and he was killed in December 2025 in what his group described as an internal dispute. Ghassan Duhine subsequently became leader of the Popular Forces.
By the time of Abu Shabab’s death, the group had been joined by at least three other Israeli-backed armed Palestinian factions, which together are estimated to have several thousand members. Each of the groups holds a distinct patch of land within the approximately half of Gaza that remains under Israeli military control following the October 2025 ceasefire agreement with Hamas.
Another anti-Hamas armed Palestinian militia, the Counter-Terrorism Strike Force, was formed in August 2025 in Khan Younis by Hussam Al-Astal when he split from the Popular Forces.
Al-Astal, a former Palestinian Authority security officer, has been linked by researchers to a 2018 Mossad operation in Malaysia, and he has publicly courted the former British prime minister, Tony Blair, as a partner for a post-Hamas administration.
In northern Gaza, the Popular Army — also known as Popular Army-Northern Forces — is led by Ashraf Al-Mansi and is composed largely of former narcotics traffickers, according to research groups that track the factions. In eastern Gaza City, the Shujaiya Popular Defense Forces is led by Rami Hilles, whose own extended clan publicly cut ties with him and reaffirmed its loyalty to the Palestinian national cause.
Al-Astal has at times claimed the other groups to be his partners in what he calls “Project New Gaza.” Researchers say most of their commanders and members are Fatah-aligned, and several previously served in the Palestinian Authority’s security forces. Prior links between some of the fighters and Daesh-affiliated networks or smuggling routes through Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula have also been documented.
Israel supplies the groups with weapons, cash and, according to accounts from soldiers cited by Haaretz, drone and artillery support during operations. There is also said to be a financial and logistical association between the groups and the Washington-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the aid-distribution mechanism set up after Israel and the US sidelined the UN-led aid system early in the war.
The militias have been repeatedly accused by Palestinians, aid officials and journalists of looting humanitarian convoys along a transportation corridor near the Kerem Shalom border crossing that aid workers nicknamed “Looters’ Alley,” and of harassing and extorting people passing through Rafah, raiding homes, opening fire on residents and burning property in areas under their control.
A local militia commander in the Deir Al-Balah area told Haaretz his fighters directly relayed to residents Israeli instructions ordering them to abandon their homes.
Hamas has branded the militia members traitors and collaborators and has moved aggressively to suppress them, deploying its Radaa internal security force to kill, arrest or disarm fighters from the rival groups, including in Jabalia and Khan Younis.
Analysts note that the public standing of the factions among Gazans remains weak, as major clans in the territory largely decline to embrace them and continue to express allegiance to Hamas.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on May 15 that hundreds of families were forcibly displaced from eastern Deir Al-Balah after Palestinian militia forces entered their shelters and ordered them out, with the same families separately reporting telephone calls from people identifying themselves as Israeli forces who similarly ordered them to leave.
Jonathan Whittall, the head of OCHA for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, had warned nearly a year earlier that “the real theft of aid” during the war was being carried out by criminal gangs operating “under the watch of Israeli forces.” He later clarified he meant groups such as, and including, Abu Shabab’s.
UN human rights officials have highlighted similar dynamics without always naming the individual militias involved. Srinivasan Muralidhar, who chairs the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, told the Human Rights Council in June that armed actors in Gaza “operate within environments engineered by Israel,” leaving communities caught between Israeli forces and a separate reign of fear.
The UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Volker Turk, told the council in February that his office had documented a “consistent pattern” of unpunished abuses in Gaza and the West Bank involving “Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups” operating alongside Israeli forces, calling the impunity they enjoy “nothing short of shameful.”
A separate report from Turk’s office that same month warned of concerns about ethnic cleansing tied to forced displacement, and urged states to halt arms transfers that facilitate violations of international law.
