Israel’s long-standing collaboration with ISIS-linked criminals looting aid in Gaza
Israel’s ties with ISIS-linked criminals in Gaza are fuelling aid looting and deepening the already catastrophic humanitarian crisis.
In the early days of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the Israelis tried every possible propaganda tool in their extensive toolbox to throw at the Palestinians and their armed resistance, with the twin purpose of turning global opinion in favour of their genocidal crimes and simultaneously painting the lawful Palestinian resistance as illegitimate. One such attempt was equating Hamas with ISIS. This nauseating attempt came from the very top.
Within the first week of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, Netanyahu declared, “We are fighting a cruel enemy, worse than ISIS,” comparing the Palestinian resistance to the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Yoav Gallant, the then Israeli war minister, pitched in with his own repugnant line: “We will wipe this thing called Hamas, ISIS-Gaza, off the face of the earth. It will cease to exist.” Lloyd Austin, US Secretary of Defence at the time, was on board with the duplicitous Israeli framing, declaring, “I know a lot about ISIS, and [what Hamas has done] is worse than what I saw with ISIS.”
Consider this tweet from the Israeli PM’s account on November 20, 2023, with the hashtag #hamasisISIS:
These Israeli attempts to equate the native resistance against Israeli occupation with a global network of terrorism, which has been entirely created, funded, and protected by the US, Israel, and their allies, are not new. Speaking to the UN General Assembly in September 2014, Netanyahu declared: “Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas.”
The reality couldn’t be further from Israeli propaganda.
None other than stalwarts of Western propaganda, such as the Financial Times and the New York Times, have published stories about Hamas’s intense efforts to root out any semblance of ISIS operatives gaining a foothold in Gaza.
Financial Times, in a 2015 article titled Hamas seeks to stamp out Isis in Gaza, reported that Hamas rooted out an “Islamic emirate” announced by a Salafi group in 2009.
Hamas last fought openly with local Salafis in 2009, when the leader of one group, Jund Ansar Allah, declared the establishment of an Islamic emirate in Gaza. Hamas responded brutally, storming a mosque in Rafah, southern Gaza, where the group was operating and killing more than two dozen people.
In 2015, as ISIS started to conduct terror attacks in Gaza, Hamas began cracking down on them in a bid to stamp out their presence in the besieged enclave and imprisoned dozens of ISIS terrorists in its prison cells.
The New York Times, in a 2018 article titled ISIS Declares War on Hamas, and Gaza Families Disown Sons in Sinai, reported that an ISIS affiliate operating out of the Sinai in Egypt declared all of Hamas as “apostates” and, therefore, fit for slaughter.
ISIS is fond of declaring anyone not adhering to its CIA, MI6, and Mossad-funded interpretation of Islam as apostates fit for slaughter. What un-Islamic acts did Hamas commit to earn such a label from ISIS, of all Western-funded groups? The New York Times answers, citing an ISIS video: “The video accuses Hamas of betraying Palestinians by imprisoning extremists in Gaza, failing to prevent the American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and being supported by Iran.”
Hamas’s crime was imprisoning the Western-backed extremist trying to spread unrest in Gaza, failing to stop something it was entirely powerless to stop, and taking support from a non-Sunni state. Further, for these supposed failings of Hamas, ISIS deemed it appropriate to attack “Hamas’s members, courts and security positions, as well as on Shiites and Christians in Gaza.”
This is enough evidence, if anyone needed it, that Hamas and ISIS couldn’t be further from each other on every conceivable metric. Thus, the pathetic Israeli attempts to paint Hamas with the ISIS brushstroke were just that: pathetic.
Now, it has been made official that ISIS is actually Israel, by none other than an Israeli member of parliament.
“Israel is providing weapons to a Jihadist group in the Gaza Strip affiliated with ISIS,” former Israeli war minister Avigdor Lieberman said Thursday.
The Israeli prime minister’s office has even tacitly acknowledged funding and aiding the ISIS group in Gaza to defeat Hamas. According to Haaretz:
Responding to the allegations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that “Israel is working to defeat Hamas in various ways, on the recommendation of all heads of the security establishment.”
In their bid to carry out nefarious designs in Gaza, the Israelis have mounted a full-spectrum campaign that goes beyond relentless bombardments and a starvation siege. It also involves inviting Palestinians into certain areas on the promise of parcels of food before shooting them at point-blank range with the help of its ISIS affiliates inside the enclave.
To this ghastly end, Israel’s point man is Yasser Abu Shabab. Back in November last year, The Washington Post, reported:
The internal U.N. memo obtained by The Post identified Yasser Abu Shabab — a member of the Tarabin tribe, which spans southern Gaza, the Negev Desert in Israel and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula — as “the main and most influential stakeholder behind systematic and massive looting” of aid convoys.
His band of thugs has become even more emboldened now that the meagre aid is going into very specific designated areas. Now suited in gear likely supplied by the Israelis, complete with insignia bearing the Palestinian flag, Abu Shabab and his men work under cover from the Israeli occupation forces, which allow them protection from the Hamas fighters in the enclave.
Last week, the Israeli occupation forces released a video on Twitter claiming that it showed Hamas men shooting at civilians gathered for aid.
However, the video was quickly debunked.
Ramy Abdu of the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor revealed that the video showed Israel-backed terrorists opening fire on civilians:
The Israeli [army] spokesperson published a video suggesting Israel wasn’t responsible for the massacre of starving civilians near the American food distribution point in Rafah, southern Gaza. But the video backfired and turned into a scandal.
The footage actually showed a theft operation in Khan Yunis, not Rafah, by gangs backed by Israel. Civilians tried to retrieve some of the stolen aid, while the gang — operating under Israeli drone surveillance — fired into the air without injuring anyone.
For the record, Israel targets any attempt to secure aid.
Even the occupation forces have acknowledged that Hamas has not been involved in a single aid looting event in the Gaza Strip. “There are 110 looting events, and according to the IDF, none were carried out by Hamas but by three different groups: Gazans, armed gangs and organised clan,” Israeli outlet Mako reported last month.
Abu Shabab was imprisoned by Hamas before October 7 on charges of possessing large quantities of narcotics and has since seen a revival in his ghastly career by entering into alliance with the biggest terrorists of them all: the Israelis.
His nefarious activities have worsened an already catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza.
And it’s entirely by Israeli design.
Reacting to the 2018 ISIS video that declared Hamas as “apostates,” senior Hamas official Salah al-Bardawil — who was assassinated along with his wife this March while praying on the 23rd night of Ramadan in their tent in Khan Yunis — had described the video as a “Zionist” production.
While Hamas nipped the previous “Zionist” production in the bud, its latest iteration is wreaking havoc in Gaza.
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I just listened to the GRAYZONE's Max Blumenthal and Aaran Mate discussing this latest twisted ethno supremist Israel tactic. Hiring terrorist in northern Egypt to disrupt the few aid trucks crossing into Gaza.
The world is watching Israel. We see the atrocities. And soon the world will be acting.
Thanks for testifying to the truth