mondoweiss.net/2025/05/israel-is-creating-a-power-vacuum-in-gaza-by-backing-armed-looters-and-killing-anyone-who-tries-to-stop-them/
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Israel has been waging a war on Gaza’s ability to govern itself and maintain law and order as a part of its 18-month-long genocidal campaign. The broad objective of this strategy has been to create a civil and humanitarian vacuum in Gaza that would lead to chaos and lawlessness. The intended effect, in Israel’s eyes, is either total social collapse, the spread of criminality, or the emergence of an alternative “clan”-based leadership in Gaza instead of Hamas. Israel stands to gain from any of those scenarios.
To make sure this administrative vacuum is maintained, Israel has launched periodic assassination campaigns targeting members of Gaza’s civil government — the police force, the security forces, the Civil Defense, and the healthcare system.
Israel has instrumentalized the fact that all these civil branches of government in Gaza, by definition, fall under Hamas control, given that it is the ruling faction in the strip. Consequently, it labels any Gaza civil servant as a “Hamas operative,” an association that has allowed Israel to legitimize the targeting of an entire category of civilian workers. They have included firefighters, medics, nurses, doctors, first responders, police officers, and other civil servants who were killed in the line of duty.
Over the past several months, Mondoweiss has collected testimonies from officials and field operatives in the Gaza government’s civil branches, documenting Israel’s targeting campaign and its sanctioning of looting and lawlessness to exacerbate famine conditions in Gaza. On one occasion, Mondoweiss was also able to obtain testimony from a young man who joined a group that looted aid convoys in December 2024.
Our reporting shows that dismantling these components of Gaza’s civil services has been a key objective of Israel’s genocide. On the other side of that process, the Israeli army has either encouraged or turned a blind eye to armed gangs that have intermittently looted aid trucks, marketplaces, and warehouses in Gaza throughout the past 18 months of war.
But today, growing evidence from local reports shows that Israel is actively fomenting and possibly arming them as they loot scarce food resources — and then targets and kills those who attempt to stop the robberies. Some of those killed by Israel are community volunteers, according to local sources, while many others are police officers and security personnel in the civilian branch of Gaza’s government.
The most recent of these attacks came just last week when Israeli airstrikes killed a number of police officers and civilians who were protecting markets and food warehouses in Gaza City. One police officer, killed on May 2 while on duty in the al-Nasr area of Gaza City, was identified as As’ad Yahya Kafarneh. According to one family member, Kafarneh was in charge of a police patrol leading efforts to “confront gangs collaborating with the Israeli occupation, which work to rob food storage facilities.”
According to several reports from eyewitnesses and local journalists, compiled in a thread by Drop Site News, many of these gangs seem to be doing the looting with Israeli air support from quadcopter drones, with some eyewitnesses saying that it is part of a “coordinated effort to spread insecurity” in Gaza. Drop Site contributor Abubaker Abed also cited local reports indicating the existence of undercover Israeli operatives posing as Gazans who supply weapons and arm local gangs to carry out robberies. “The timing of their crimes is exactly in line with the appearance of warplanes in the sky,” Abed added.
“These acts are not spontaneous,” Ismail Thawabta, the head of the Government Media Office in Gaza, told Mondoweiss in a statement on Sunday. “They are not the result of hunger or necessity, as is being said, but are backed by malicious intentions aiming to sow chaos and damage the social fabric.”
Thawabta added that some of the looting groups are “directly acting on the directives of Israeli forces.” They are armed and “semi-organized,” he said, and “some of the known names have been brought before the law and neutralized.”
Thawabta asserted that security forces in Gaza are working to uncover these networks “with decisiveness and responsibility,” vowing to prevent “any security vacuum that could be exploited.”
This security vacuum was directly created by Israel’s concerted campaign of targeting members of the Gaza government’s civilian branches and assassinating its leaders. The killings have led the Hamas government’s civil servants to go underground.
“The occupation wants to destroy Gaza’s entire civil infrastructure,” Abu Udai, the head of the Information Security Department of a government security agency in Gaza City, told Mondoweiss in a statement in March following the breakdown of the short-lived ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. “Everyone who holds government positions, even low-level positions, feels in constant danger…especially for their families, because the majority of those assassinated were killed with their families.”
When Israel broke the ceasefire on March 18, it killed 400 people in one night, including 130 children. Among the civil service leaders targeted were the coordinator of government action in Gaza, Isam Da’alis, the Deputy Minister of Justice, Mahmoud Hatteh, the Deputy Minister of Interior, Ahmad Abu Watfeh, and the head of the Security Service, Bahjat Abu Sultan.
At the time, Haaretz published a report giving the impression that the targeting of civil leaders was new. A source “familiar with cabinet discussions” told the Israeli newspaper that Netanyahu “believes the mode of fighting in Gaza needs to change, and Israel should target not only the military leadership of Hamas, but also its civil leadership.” According to Haaretz, “the government hopes that armed gangs not loyal to the organization, so-called ‘clans,’ will take over if Hamas’s domestic control weakens.”
But none of these strategies of targeting civil government personnel are new. Israel has deliberately targeted leaders and low-level civil servants over the past 18 months, especially the police force and security units assigned to protect aid convoys from looting. The most recent wave of assassinations, coupled with the spread of anarchy in Gaza, is just the latest escalation.SECURITY GUARDS SIT ATOP TRUCKS CARRYING HUMANITARIAN AID COMING IN FROM THE KARAM ABU SALEM BORDER CROSSING IN AL-SHOKA, EAST OF RAFAH, DURING THE CEASEFIRE JANUARY 21, 2025. (PHOTO: DOAA EL-BAZ/APA IMAGES)
Creating a security vacuum
During the first six months of Israel’s war on Gaza, one of Israel’s main field objectives was to displace Palestinians from northern Gaza to the south, which it aimed to achieve through outright starvation and the blocking of aid convoys from reaching the north. For months during early 2024, food convoys were assailed by both looters and Israeli army attacks. The latter incidents often resulted in several high-profile massacres near the Nabulsi roundabout and the Kuwaiti roundabout in northern Gaza, where the Israeli army had set up checkpoints and designated the roads going through them for the passage of aid convoys.
Prolonged starvation also pushed crowds of people to rush aid convoys at these roundabouts when trucks did arrive, adding to the chaos. The most infamous incident was the “flour massacre” on February 29, when the Israeli army mowed down over 100 desperate aid-seekers at the Nabulsi roundabout on al-Rashid Street, west of Gaza City.
In many cases where convoys were attacked, the Israeli army was targeting police members who were providing protection to the convoys from looters. In fact, according to Axios, the Biden administration had asked Israel back in February 2024 to “stop targeting members of the Hamas-run civilian police force who escort aid trucks in Gaza, warning that a ‘total breakdown of law and order’ is significantly exacerbating the humanitarian crisis.”
This Israeli policy hindered the ability of the police to directly guarantee the safety of the aid convoys, so aid officials from the UN’s OCHA and the World Food Programme started working with the local community to try to protect aid convoys. Locals organized popular committees composed of tribal leaders, local clan members, and community volunteers. But the police force was not uninvolved: the popular committees were coordinated by a central figure in Gaza’s police force, Director of Operations Faiq Mabhouh, who was based in al-Shifa Hospital alongside the leadership of other branches of the civil government.
The popular committees’ efforts were successful for a few days in mid-March, with aid convoys arriving in places like the besieged Jabalia refugee camp. On March 17, 13 aid trucks arrived in the north Gaza refugee camp without incident, and to much popular fanfare. Another flour massacre had been averted.
The very next day, the Israeli army laid siege to al-Shifa Hospital, with the express purpose of assassinating Faiq Mabhouh and razing the hospital to the ground. At the time, Mondoweiss reported on the chain of events that led to the invasion of the al-Shifa medical compound, which served as a base of operations for the police force, the Civil Defense, and other civilian branches of government.
Israeli propaganda about a fictional Hamas “command-and-control center” in al-Shifa contained a kernel of truth: al-Shifa was a nexus for northern Gaza’s social order and allowed a safe haven for the coordination of humanitarian and rescue efforts in times of war. For that same reason, al-Shifa became a crucial target of Israel’s campaign in northern Gaza, because the fall of al-Shifa would accelerate social collapse in the north.
Simultaneously, Israel launched a series of targeted killings of over 100 members of the popular committees that had assisted in the aid deliveries. After those attacks, the committees disbanded, unable to guarantee the safety of their members.
At around that same time, Israel had already floated the idea of using local clans and known crime families, who had been suppressed by Hamas during its period of rule over the Strip before the war, to assume the mantle of control over Gaza. Mabhouh was rumored to have executed the head of one of those families, the Doghmosh clan.
As Israel escalated its attacks to foil the civil government’s attempts to counteract Israel’s starvation policy, criminal gangs began to take hold in different pockets throughout Gaza, usually in areas that had been cleared by the Israeli army and set up as “kill zones,” where any civilians that wandered through were shot on sight.
After Israel invaded Rafah in May 2024 and closed down the Rafah crossing, the only avenue for the entry of aid into Gaza was through the Israeli-controlled Karam Abu Salem crossing. Rafah was systematically demolished and cleared of inhabitants between May 2024 and the end of the year. In those latter months, looting and banditry under the watch of the Israeli army became endemic.
Gangs of hundreds of armed men were mostly concentrated in the Rafah area. The most prominent and notorious gang was led by a man named Yasser Abu Shabab, who became the object of interest in international media reports after the UN named him in an internal memo shared with the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and the Financial Times. Another man, Shadi Soufi, was also identified as another prominent gang leader wreaking havoc on aid convoys.
According to the UN memo, Abu Shabab and other gangs were likely “benefiting from a passive if not active benevolence,” or “protection,” by the Israeli army. The continuous thefts led to a plummeting in aid delivery and skyrocketing prices as a result of looted aid being sold on the black market.
Aid delivery became so dangerous that it got to the point that UNRWA suspended deliveries through the Karam Abu Salem crossing in December 2024.
“The biggest problem is not only the theft of goods but the fact that whoever shoots at the truck or the driver means to destroy and vandalize the truck,” said Merenda Barakat at the time, UNRWA’s Deputy Chief Area Officer, explaining the organization’s decision to suspend aid delivery. “He not only wants to steal; he doesn’t want the truck to return to work at the Karam Abu Salem crossing.”
In December, Mondoweiss obtained testimony from a man who briefly worked with a smaller group that waylaid aid convoys passing through its area in Rafah.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, Khuza’a (not his real name), 23, once joined members of a group that stole aid “from places that are difficult to reach without security [coordination] with the Israeli army,” he said, clarifying that they were “areas near the Karam Abu Salem crossing.”
According to Khuza’a, the group he was with was unarmed save for the leader, who carried a pistol. Khuza’a recounted that the leader was “constantly talking to someone on the phone” during the mission, “who directed him where to go to reach the aid trucks.” Khuza’a indicated that the leader of the group was in contact with other groups “doing the same work,” and that all those groups “went to areas under the direction of the Israeli army.”
Khuza’a says that after a single expedition with the group, he decided to stop joining them. “I went once on a reconnaissance mission,” he said. “But I couldn’t bear to go back a second time. It wasn’t just about the missing food supplies that we all needed to secure, it was more than that: it was the fact that we were working under orders from the Israeli army.”
In light of these raids, the Gaza security forces, which are part of the government’s civil apparatus, formed a special unit in November 2024 consisting of members of the Intervention and Public Order Service and the police force, called the “Arrow Unit.”
After its formation, the Arrow Unit announced that it had ambushed several thieves at the entrance to the Maghazi area in central Gaza. It also organized an ambush of members of Abu Shabab’s group, announcing on November 19 that it had killed at least 20 members of the group, and initially claimed that Abu Shabab was among the slain, alongside his brother, Fathi. Later reports revealed that Abu Shabab had survived the assassination attempt.
“We tried from the first moment to address this problem with this group that operated outside the law for many months,” Ismail Thawabta, the Gaza Media Office head, told Mondoweiss in December 2024. “We succeeded to a certain extent in this matter.”
The crackdown of the security forces, and particularly the Arrow Unit, was swift and often draconian, especially since the accused were considered collaborators with Israel. Mainstream Western media outlets were predictably quick to cover the repressive measures, highlighting how Hamas “uses brutality to maintain power.”
Thawabta explained that since these groups operated in the zone under exclusive control of the Israeli army, and where Gaza security forces could not go, they effectively worked “under the eyes of the occupation, which facilitates these behaviors.” In other words, Thawabta said, they were treated as outright collaborators who played a role in exacerbating famine and furthering the genocide.
A few months into the Hamas crackdown, Israel agreed to a ceasefire with the organization, putting an end to hostilities between mid-January and mid-March 2025. During this period, Gaza’s civil government and police force recuperated, spreading throughout Gaza and attempting to restore order to areas that had been dominated by anarchy.
“The security services entered into a confrontation [with these groups], losing many of their personnel to regain control,” Abu Malek, the director of a police station in Gaza City, told Mondoweiss in March after the ceasefire had fallen apart. “They regained control in many areas, such as Khan Younis, Rafah, and Gaza.”
Abu Malek explained that the government was able to reassert civil and administrative control over Gaza during the truce period, but that the resumption of war “brought chaos back to the forefront.”
Emerging chaos
It has been nearly two months since the ceasefire fell apart and Israel restarted its campaign of targeting the civil government and its leaders.
In that period, the police force has tried to organize popular emergency committees to provide services, Abu Malek said, including coordinating efforts to deliver water, remove rubble from the streets in coordination with municipalities, enforce price controls at marketplaces, and “combat families, clans, bandits, and thieves who seize aid.”
Much of the recent surge in banditry in Gaza City can be seen as a continuation of previous looting activity, but there are aspects of it that are new. Some of these looting efforts are growing bolder and more organized, according to local reports, in part due to Israel’s suspected assistance of these groups. In addition, since the majority of the Gaza police force and security forces have either gone underground or now operate clandestinely, it has become far more challenging to deal with these gangs. A security vacuum has been created that the civil government is struggling to fill.
As a result, calls are growing among families in Gaza for the clans to take matters into their own hands to put a stop to the epidemic of theft and criminality. These calls propose the formation of a new “united leadership” in Gaza to confront the phenomenon. Several clans have already put out statements.
In a statement on May 1, the head of the Madhoun clan in Gaza called for “the formation of a unified national leadership led by mayors, mukhtars [clan leaders], reformers, neighborhood committees, national institutions and personalities, and popular and youth committees” to confront lawlessness. The statement is couched in the language of “securing the internal front” and fighting the occupation’s policies.
Another statement put out by the head of the al-Ghoul clan on the same day limited itself to condemnations of the looting, which it said was designed to “sow chaos and mutiny” that was in line with “the occupation’s policy of persecuting and destroying our people.”
While practical steps are yet to materialize from these clan statements, they form a possible precedent in opening the way for bodies other than Hamas to assume control in some parts of Gaza. Notably, it appears that the calls for forming such committees are proposed as an alternative to the committees that the government has been trying to form in recent months. Government officials could not immediately be reached for comment regarding the circulating statements or the government’s position on them.
In a statement to Mondoweiss on May 4, Ismail Thawabta claimed that “the security situation is generally under control, despite limited attempts from some lawless groups to exploit the humanitarian conditions.” The Gaza Media Office head said that criminal gangs are “being dealt with in the field.”
Videos have circulated on social media purporting to show members of the Arrow Unit beating suspected collaborators. One widely circulated video on May 3 showed a man supposedly “confessing” to being a thief and “repenting” on camera. Other circulating statements, also purporting to be issued by the Arrow Unit, claimed that videos would be released “in the coming days” showing the field execution of three collaborators with Israel alongside their taped confessions.
Amid these circulating videos, Gaza’s Interior Ministry stated on May 3 that it would continue to pursue the outlaws “at any cost,” and Reuters has reported that Hamas has already executed several looters it accuses of collaborating with Israel.
Abu Malek, the police station director in Gaza City, contended that even though the Gaza government has been dealt a heavy blow since the ceasefire fell apart, it can rebuild itself quickly “if the human cadres and the capabilities are available,” adding that “any destroyed entity can rebuild itself.”
But this task is made increasingly harder, since even civil government employees are now wanted by Israel.
Abu Udai, the head of the Information Security Department of a Gaza City government agency, conceded in testimony for Mondoweiss that “the occupation took advantage of the ceasefire to gather information about the relationships between wanted individuals, their families, their connections, and their friends.”
“This made the strike that violated the ceasefire agreement [on March 18] successful,” Abu Udai added. “A large number of leaders and their families were targeted, and multiple figures were assassinated simultaneously.”
Abu Udai was himself the target of two different assassination attempts, which killed his wife and two sons. Other than himself, his 9-year-old daughter was the sole survivor. As of the time of Abu Udai’s testimony, obtained in late March, he was still trying to covertly visit his daughter, who was staying with an aunt.
“We cling to those who survive more than anything else,” Abu Udai explained. “We cannot abandon our families forever, so [Israel’s] circle of targeting becomes easier. Despite taking all precautions, the occupation often manages to reach us.”
Faris Giacaman
Faris Giacaman is Mondoweiss’ Palestine Editorial Director.
Tareq S. Hajjaj
Tareq S. Hajjaj is a journalist and a member of the Palestinian Writers Union. He studied English Literature at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. He started his career in journalism in 2015, working as a news writer and translator for the local newspaper, Donia al-Watan. He has reported for Elbadi, Middle East Eye, and Al Monitor. Follow him on Twitter at @Tareqshajjaj.
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