Yasser Abu Shabab, the Israeli-backed and -funded ISIS-linked thug, who was propped up by the Israelis to steal life-saving aid meant for the starving Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and to kill fighters as well as non-combatants on their behalf, was killed on Thursday.
The leader of the so-called Popular Forces, one of several gangs of collaborators the Israelis are attempting to prop up as alternatives to Hamas, Abu Shabab’s death brings an end to another sordid Israeli experiment in Gaza.
Abu Shabab’s killing has been described as a result of an “internal clash” by the Israeli press. As if to stamp a final seal on his Israeli ties, The Times of Israel, citing unnamed sources, reported that “Abu Shabab was taken to a hospital in Israel, where he died of his wounds.” Maariv reported that Abu Shabab was “killed in a mass brawl that erupted following an internal dispute.” It went on to add that “the IDF evacuated Abu Shabab to Soroka Hospital in Be’er Sheva, and that he was pronounced dead upon arrival at the emergency room.”
The Israelis are not happy with the killing of their asset. “In Israel’s security establishment, the view is that the death of Yasser Abu Shabab, the leader of one of the main clans opposing Hamas in Gaza, is a serious blow,” Maariv’s Avi Ashkenazi wrote. Amit Segal, a pro-Netanyahu Israeli propagandist for Channel 12, described the collaborator’s death “a bad development for Israel” as “Hamas viewed him as a strategic threat to its rule.”
Although Palestinian resistance has been actively going after the collaborators, it is unclear if Abu Shabab’s killing was the handiwork of a resistance operation. Indeed, the internal security force of Hamas, Radaa, published a poster marking the traitor’s death with the following message: “Just like we told you: ‘Israel won’t protect you’.”
Abu Shabab was arrested in 2015 by Hamas, the governing authority in the Gaza Strip, on drug-trafficking charges and was serving a 25-year sentence in a Khan Yunis prison. He escaped the prison in October 2023 after the Israelis bombed it during the early days of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Subsequently, Abu Shabab, who built his base in Rafah — which was completely wiped off the map by relentless Israeli bombings and demolition campaigns over the past two years — went on to become one of the biggest Israeli assets in Gaza.
“Opposition lawmaker and former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman,” Israeli paper Haaretz reported in June, said that “Israel is providing weapons to a Jihadist group in the Gaza Strip affiliated with ISIS.”
Abu Shabab used the Israeli-supplied weapons and air support to wreak havoc against the starving Palestinians searching for much-needed aid as a full-spectrum Israeli blockade led to a famine in the summer, and killed hundreds due to starvation. While Israel blamed Hamas for the stealing of the meagre amounts of aid that was trickling into the besieged enclave, all humanitarian agencies and even Israeli outlets made it clear that aid theft was the work of Israel-backed gangs, the most prominent of which was Abu Shabab’s Popular Forces.
“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 in May.
That same month, Jonathan Whittall, the head of United Nations office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Occupied Palestinian Territories (OCHA OPT), laid the blame squarely on the Israelis for the theft of the necessary aid. “The real theft of aid since the beginning of the war has been carried out by criminal gangs, under the watch of Israeli forces, and they were allowed to operate in proximity to the Kerem Shalom crossing point into Gaza,” Whittall said. The Guardian confirmed with Whittall that he was “referring to gangs such as Abu Shabab.”
Nevertheless, the Israelis persisted in pushing their favoured thug from the ISIS — the terrorist organisation created, protected, and funded by the Israelis and the United States — as a popular figure in Gaza and as an alternative to Hamas rule in the Gaza Strip.
The Israelis and their pro-genocide backers in the West used all means at their disposal to whitewash Abu Shabab and his band of terrorists. In what will go down as the most blatant example of the so-called elite Western journalism institutions serving as nothing more than glorified propaganda outlets, The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by none other than Abu Shabab himself.
In the article published under the title, Gazans Are Finished With Hamas, Abu Shabab wrote: “The Popular Forces, an independent Palestinian group under my leadership, have secured several square kilometers of land that have been home to my Bedouin tribe, the Tarabin, for generations.” He then went on to describe the supposed utopia he had created in his little fiefdom run under Israeli protection: “As a result, life here no longer feels like life in Gaza. In eastern Rafah, people have access to shelter, food, water, and basic medical supplies—all without fear of Hamas stealing aid or being caught in the crossfire with the Israeli military.”
In the article, Abu Shabab went on to disparage UNRWA, the only outlet for Palestinians to receive aid in a dignified fashion, and praise the presence of Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip. “This should not be the exception in Gaza—it can be the model, the new norm,” he wrote of his little domain.
“Mr. Shabab is commander of the Popular Forces in Gaza,” The Wall Street Journal, which apparently has over 4.13 million digital and over 412,000 print subscribers, wrote for the terrorist’s author bio. (To get a glimpse of the brain rot of the readers of such hallowed Western journalistic institutions as The Wall Street Journal, try reading the comments under “Mr. Shabab’s” piece.)
One Palestinian official remarked at the time that Abu Shabab, who was illiterate, could not even write in Arabic, his mother tongue, let alone English.
Continuing his upward trajectory, the freshly minted Wall Street Journal opinion writer Abu Shabab even met Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and henchman, last month at the US-run so-called Ceasefire Management and Coordination Centre in the Kiryat Gat settlement in southern occupied Palestine. Defining “the role of local collaborator groups in occupied areas” was among the topics discussed between Kushner and the traitor.
The whole Abu Shabab affair has served as a neat microcosm of some of the ways the Israelis have attempted to sell their ghastly designs in the Gaza Strip. But just like all their prior attempts in Gaza — such as the General’s Plan, Gideon’s Chariots, Gideon’s Chariots II, to name just a few — the traitor-as-the-ruler plan also appears to be going nowhere, as their biggest asset to that end has just been consigned to the dustbin of history.
In the end, Abu Shabab’s fall is not simply the collapse of one quisling — it is the collapse of yet another Israeli fantasy that Gaza can be broken by manufactured proxies and stage-managed narratives.
After 26 months of siege, starvation, non-stop bombings, relentless propaganda, and experiments in social engineering, Israel has little to show for its efforts except the wreckage of its own illusions. The collaborators it groomed are crumbling, the plans it floated lie in ruins, and the people it sought to dominate remain unbowed.
Gaza has been battered, but its political will has not been engineered away. That is the verdict Israel cannot escape: even under the most ruthless conditions imposed by the Israelis and their powerful and ruthless Western and quisling Arab backers, Palestinians continue to endure, insist on their own agency, and remind the world — simply by surviving and making the most of their limited resources — that no external manipulation can overwrite a people’s resistance to oppression.
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A.M.F. = Adios, Motherfucker.
Hope for more good news 👍