Hamas-led gunmen in Gaza executed 18 Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel yesterday, a day after Israeli forces killed three Hamas commanders, the highest-ranking militants to die in the six-week war.
Militants wearing masks and dressed in black gunned down seven of those condemned, whose faces were covered and hands bound, in front of worshippers emerging from the Omari mosque on Palestine Square, in the first public executions in the enclave since the 1990s.
A further 11 were killed at an abandoned police station near Gaza City, Hamas security officials said. Two bodies were seen being loaded onto an ambulance before Reuters journalists were told to leave the area.
“The resistance has begun an operation called ‘strangling the necks’, targeting collaborators who aid the [Israeli] occupation, kill our people and destroy houses,” said Al-Majd, a website run by Hamas’s internal security service.
Crackdown follows killing of three of Hamas’s most senior military commanders
A so-called conviction letter signed by the “Palestinian Resistance” was posted on a wall near where the bodies of the alleged collaborators lay. The notice read: “They provided the enemy with information about the whereabouts of fighters, tunnels of resistance, bombs, houses of fighters and places of rockets, and the occupation bombarded these areas, killing a number of fighters... therefore, the ruling of revolutionary justice was handed upon him.”
The crackdown on suspected collaborators follows the killing of three of Hamas’s most senior military commanders in an Israeli air strike on Thursday. That attack depended on precise intelligence on their whereabouts.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights denounced the killings of Gazans by militants.
“We demand the Palestinian National Authority and the resistance [Palestinian armed factions] to intervene to stop these extra-judicial executions, no matter what the reasons and motives are,” said organisation chairman Raji al-Surani.
Fighting between Israel and Hamas raged on. A mortar bomb fired from Gaza killed a four-year-old Israeli boy, the first Israeli child killed in the conflict.
More than 80 rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel, wounding three people at a synagogue in Ashdod and two others in Beersheba and Sderot, Israeli police said.
Israeli forces carried out more than 25 air strikes in Gaza yesterday, killing four people, Palestinian health officials said. Israel launched its offensive on Gaza on July 8 with the stated aim of putting an end to cross-border rocket fire.
More than 2,070 Palestinians have since been killed in the conflict, mostly civilians, while large areas of Gaza were destroyed, leaving around 400,000 of the enclave’s 1.8 million people displaced. Sixty-four Israeli soldiers and four civilians in Israel have died.